On Monday, 17th of October the trail for a supposed throw of a blue police flasher on the first Pegida-anniversary ended on a historical date.
In the beginning, a police video apparently cut from multiple hand cameras was shown. It didn’t show the actual action, and besides frequent zooms on rarely masked faces of the peaceful counter protesters, the accused could only be identified at his arrest.
Nonetheless the court showed little doubt in the story of the undercover police agents who were heard on the previous court day, prompting the counsel for defense to request the limitation of the trail to the amount of the daily rate of the previously issued penalty order. At 90 daily rates, the penalty order had just stayed under the limit for inclusion in the defendant’s certificate of good conduct, while in a likely conviction, a minimum daily rate of 60 would have been imposed anyway.
Citing the defendant’s financial situations, the judge agreed to limit the daily rate to the minimum of 10 EUR per day.
After the proclamation of sentence, the trail’s political dimension was again brought to the fore: after the defense lawyer had accused the law enforcement authorities of turning a blind eye to right-wing political crime and the accused in place of a final statement just pointed out Saxonian conditions, the judge repudiated these insinuations: even though the first and so far only conviction because of the events on the 19th of October 2015 is that of a participant of the counter demonstration, so at least she personally was not oblivious to right wing crime. She also convicted right-wing crimes and pointed to her colleaque’s ongoing trails about the events in Freital and Heidenau.
Unfortunately, in the light of Saxonian convictions, this vehement repudiation is indeed to be seen for the judge personally, more so as the police witnesses statements of the previous court day were barely examined critically:
There was no doubt of the undercover police officer supposedly recognizing a hole in the defendants glove. At least, the judge remarked that the differing undercover police witness statements regarding the breaking off of the flasher hints that they didn’t coordinate beforehand. With that, a risky trail ended relatively mild for Saxonian conditions.