In the process of infanticide in a sect in Hanau, the public prosecutor's office has filed a bias application against all three professional judges of the first large criminal chamber of the district court in Hanau.

At the hearing on Tuesday, public prosecutor Dominik Mies expressed his doubts about the impartiality of the criminal chamber.

It is a rarity for a prosecutor to file a motion for bias.

Usually judges are almost only rejected by defense lawyers because of bias.

Another chamber of the district court must now decide on the allegation of bias.

Jan Schiefenhoevel

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The reason for the application is that the criminal division of the regional court released the accused Claudia H. from custody in March.

The woman is accused of having killed her then four-year-old son in 1988 or at least being partly to blame for his death.

The accused is said to have belonged to a small religious community in the western part of Hanau.

In another trial over the child's death, the alleged leader of the religious circle, Sylvia D., was sentenced to life imprisonment for the boy's murder in September 2020.

According to the verdict, the child had been forced into a sack for a nap.

In it, it passed out from lack of oxygen and choked on its vomit while Sylvia.

D. was the only adult in the house, as stated in the verdict.

Claudia H. had entrusted her to looking after the four-year-old.

The Federal Court of Justice overturned this first judgment from 2020, as the Hanau Regional Court announced on Monday.

The federal judges ordered a new trial against the alleged cult leader, which will be conducted before the Frankfurt Regional Court.

Not fair action by the Chamber

In the second trial against the mother of the child who was killed, which is currently ongoing in Hanau, prosecutor Mies accuses the judges of already knowing about the decision of the Federal Court of Justice when they lifted the arrest warrant in March.

The federal judges had decided about a week before the revision request.

The criminal chamber, chaired by Susanne Wetzel, the former court president, did not inform the public prosecutor's office about the message from the Federal Court of Justice.

Rather, one of the judges of the chamber only spoke about it casually in a telephone call on Monday.

The representatives of the prosecution only found out more than two months later that the first judgment had been annulled.

This is not fair action by the Chamber.

The process is only fair if everyone involved has the same level of knowledge.

Judges let the process "slip along"

Mies saw a connection between the decision of the federal judges and the decision of the Hanau chamber to release the mother of the four-year-old who was killed from custody, as he explained on Tuesday.

The judges allowed themselves to be influenced by the decision of the Federal Court of Justice and made an unlawful decision even before their verdict.

Since March, when they learned of the quashing of the verdict in the first trial, they have shown no commitment to advancing the current trial and have let it "slop along".

For example, they did not consider it necessary to question an important witness, namely the member of the religious community who is said to have sewn the sack in which the child suffocated.

In this situation, distrust of the chamber is justified, and trust in its impartiality is disturbed, said the prosecutor.

The defense countered that the prosecutor should not simply assume that the judges knew about the decision of the Federal Court of Justice at an early stage, but should have asked about it first.

The next dates are scheduled for June.

However, negotiations will only take place if a decision on the application for bias has been made by then.