German Court Convicts Internet Cannibal of Manslaughter

German Court Convicts Internet Cannibal of Manslaughter

By MARK LANDLER

Published: January 31, 2004

FRANKFURT, Jan. 30 — A German computer technician who killed and ate a willing victim he found through the Internet was convicted of manslaughter on Friday, in a ruling that reflected the legal ambiguities of a case that has, by turns, fascinated and repulsed people here.
A court in Kassel, about 90 miles north of here, sentenced the man, Armin Meiwes, to eight-and-a-half years in prison for killing Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, who responded to an Internet posting by Mr. Meiwes seeking someone willing to be "slaughtered." The three-judge court rejected the prosecution's plea for a murder conviction and a life sentence.
[]"Both were looking for the ultimate kick," said the chief judge, Volker Mütze, after reading the verdict. "This was an act between two extremely disturbed people who both wanted something from each other."
The conviction on a lesser charge means that Mr. Meiwes could be released in less than five years.
Harald Ermel, a lawyer for Mr. Meiwes, said he would appeal the verdict. Mr. Ermel had argued that his client was only guilty of "killing on request," an illegal form of euthanasia that carries a maximum jail term of five years.
"He's a model prisoner," Mr. Ermel told reporters at the courthouse. "He will voluntarily undergo psychiatric therapy to get away from his fetish for men's flesh. I'm sure he won't do anything like this again."
That is not likely to calm the nerves of people in Rotenburg an der Fulda, the secluded village south of Kassel where Mr. Meiwes, 42, lived in a rambling half-timbered house. He played host there to four other men who responded to his Web posting, before finding the 43-year-old Mr. Brandes in March 2001.
What followed was an evening of sexual role-playing and violence, much of it videotaped by Mr. Meiwes. In the end, he stabbed Mr. Brandes to death with a kitchen knife, hung the corpse on a meat hook, and carved it up, storing pieces of flesh in plastic bags in his freezer.
"With every piece of flesh I ate, I remembered him," Mr. Meiwes said during his trial. "It was like taking communion."
It was hard to reconcile the placid, well-dressed defendant in the courtroom with the grisly testimony. Yet it was the legal dilemma, as much as the lurid details of the case, that consumed the court. Convicting Mr. Meiwes of murder would have been difficult, according to legal experts, because the victim consented, even pleaded, to be killed. But confining Mr. Meiwes to a psychiatric hospital would also have presented problems because a court-appointed psychiatrist testified that he was not suffering from "diminished responsibility" at the time of the killing.
Do you think this is justice served?