Decisions or Rulings - "Cold Case": Murder Conviction in the Cornfield
A woman's body was found by a dog near the Rhine dike in a cornfield on August 21, 1992. The case went unsolved for a while until investigators looked into old files. They found a match in the DNA database and tracked it down to a man who had been in prison for 29 years for child murder. This man had killed an 11-year-old student in Bad Liebenzell, Baden-Württemberg three years before the murder in the cornfield in 1995.
During the trial, he denied committing both crimes. Because the murder in Meerbusch happened three years before the one in Bad Liebenzell, the Düsseldorf Regional Court gave him a combined sentence and couldn't increase it further since it was already the maximum punishment.
The trial centered around the significance of old DNA evidence. Defense lawyer Maximilian Klefenz said that DNA on fingernails is common in 90% of people, just from everyday contact. He also claimed that there could've been contamination during evidence collection. But there were no reliable solutions to clean instruments. The prosecution maintained that the high-quality DNA trace couldn't have come from a random contamination.
And here's the note: Notification from the BGH. [BGH stands for Bundesgerichtshof, the German Federal Court of Justice].
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Source: www.stern.de
