With a petition to the Austrian Federal President Alexander van der Bellen, the pianist and former music university rector Siegfried Mauser, who was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for sexual assault, would like to avert his imprisonment, which the Salzburg Regional Court ordered on February 1 after it Mauser had declared liable on the basis of a medical report.

Mauser was convicted by the Munich Regional Court in 2018, but since he is also an Austrian citizen, after the Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal, he applied to be allowed to serve his sentence in Austria if he had to serve it.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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As he told the FAZ, his lawyer Johann Schwenn has asked the Federal President to postpone the execution of the sentence by way of pardon because a constitutional complaint is pending with the German Federal Constitutional Court.

At the same time, Schwenn asked the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, as the holder of the right of clemency, to declare his consent.

The constitutional complaint is directed against the rejection of an application for retrial that casts doubt on the credibility of the victim, a singer who, according to the Munich criminal judgment, is said to have forced Mauser to accept his sexual acts in an identical manner in three job interviews in different years.

Before the district court and the BGH, Mauser was represented by a Munich law firm that now operates under the name Stevens & Partner.

Alexander Stevens has also made a name for himself through his publishing activities and media appearances as a critic of the reformed sexual criminal law and the application of this law by the judiciary.

suspicion of false accusation

The co-plaintiff in the proceedings before the Munich district court, the second criminal case against Mauser that ended with a conviction, testified as a witness that she had experienced the same thing with the accused many years ago with a conductor in the Cologne area. She had similarly admitted to the police interrogation, with a more precise location. She was dragged into a bush and kissed, after which she slapped the conductor and reported him. As a result, she lost her commitment and hardly received any more orders in Germany.

According to Schwenn, Mauser's former defense attorneys should not have investigated the credibility of this report because they could not have imagined "that a criminal court would give anything to the testimony of this highly conspicuous witness". After Schwenn took over the mandate, he found the conductor and went to see him. He based the application for reinstatement on the transcript of his description. The district court of Augsburg did not allow the retrial due to the lack of suitability of facts and evidence to bring about an acquittal; the appeal to the Munich Higher Regional Court was unsuccessful.

Schwenn accuses the criminal senate of disregarding the principles of reopening that it identified as constitutionally important in its decision to repeal the farmer Rupp (“Tot ist dead”). Before the Federal Constitutional Court can decide on the constitutional complaint, the Higher Regional Court must rule on the complaint submitted to it at the same time that the fundamental right to a fair hearing has been violated.

Johann Schwenn, whose Hamburg law firm advertises on the Internet with the brand "More Criminal Law", became known to a very large public as the defense attorney for weather expert Jörg Kachelmann, who was acquitted of the charge of rape in 2011.

In 2010 he published a specialist article in the magazine "Strafverdeidiger" entitled "Misjudgments and their causes - the reopening of proceedings for sexual abuse".