Re: court trial against me - the outcome

[mark485anderson@xxxxxx]

What would have happened if you had not accepted their plea agreement?

Used to be here in the USA they had to bring u personally to court to
try and convict you.
Now they are convicting "in abstencia" for many crimes.

Because the courts, judges and prosecutors are too incompetent or busy,
they just convict you whether they give you your rights or not. The
government does what they can get away with and increasingly this means
they do not follow their own laws; constitutionaly restraints. Of course
when you get IDIOTS like G.W. Bush in Office and have an IDIOT populace
that votes for him, you deserve what you get, :-).

I thought Europe was better, but I guess not. Here in the U.S., we
frequently have people in the courts and police who are too stupid to
hold jobs in the private sector.

I think you did the right thing by ignoring their invitation. Do
everything you can to make their jobs more difficult, resist as far as
you are able.


On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:22:29 +0100, "Mirko Thiesen"
<Mirko.Thiesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> Good morning,
> 
> I've been operating a Tor node (NetWorkXXIII) for quite some years now
> (although it was down for several months as it was facing repeated DDoS
> attacks earlier this year).
> 
> In June the local police informed me about preliminary proceedings
> against
> me by asking me (by mail) to "visit" them. The letter mentioned computer
> fraud (actually it was "Computerbetrug in Tateinheit mit Faelschung
> beweiserheblicher Daten gemaess Paragrafen 263a, 269, 52 StGB"), but
> since I
> hadn't done anything I followed the general advice in such situations:
> You
> have the right to remain silent. Use it. So I decided not to go to the
> police - if you haven't done anything and you don't even have a clue what
> they are talking about, it usually can only get worse. Apart from that,
> the
> day they wanted me to come I was not even in town.
> 
> In early September I received a penalty order ("Strafbefehl") - from the
> court. A judge found me guilty of having ordered a gift voucher (value:
> 51
> EUR) on amazon.de, providing address details of a living person (but not
> myself obviously), and using a Web.de email address registered
> specifically
> for this purpose. I was sentenced to pay a fine of 500 EUR.
> 
> Because I hadn't ordered the voucher, I appealed ("form- und
> fristgerechter
> Einspruch") to that penalty order, which led - according to German laws -
> to
> an actual trial. This trial was held today.
> 
> While the penalty order listed four witnesses (the person whose address
> details had been used, a police officer in a cow town near that person's
> home hometown, a local police officer, and an employee of amazon.de), the
> summoning ("Ladung") to the actual trial didn't list any witnesses at
> all. I
> had been a lay assessor ("Schoeffe") for four years in Germany (but in a
> different part of the country), so I knew that this usually would be a
> good
> sign as the judge(s) during the actual trial wouldn't have much more than
> the defendant's testimony (and of course the records) to rely on.
> 
> Well, it turned out to be the exact opposite of what I had expected. They
> had absolutely no doubts that I was at least somehow guilty. I explained
> in
> great detail what Tor is and what it is used for, and the judge asked me:
> "Is this illegal?" Wow - shouldn't she know?! I replied "No, of course
> not.
> Otherwise I wouldn't do it." 
> 
> The judge and the public prosecutor realized soon that I probably wasn't
> the
> originator of the transaction in question. But instead of realizing the
> faults of the police and the public prosecutor's department (German laws
> say
> that they have to investigate *all* aspects of a crime and not just find
> someone that seems to be somehow guilty at first sight), they tried to
> construct a case of aiding and abetting ("Beihilfe") - they insisted that
> I
> most probably set up my node in  order to help people committing crimes.
> Or
> at least I accepted that people would commit crimes using my Tor node. I
> asked "What about a postal service that delivers i.e. a bomb or a
> blackmail
> letter? Do they help people committing crimes as well?" They said that
> these
> two things could not be compared as a postal service offers
> transportation
> services whereas I offer anonymization services.
> 
> To make a long story short: The judge as well as the public prosecutor
> refused to accept that I didn't do anything  criminal, that I didn't and
> still don't want to help anyone committing a crime (at least not more
> than
> i.e. <put a random
> telco/ISP/postal service here> does), and that they should have
> investigated
> the issue further beforehand.
> 
> They offered me to dismiss the actual court trial according to paragraph
> 153
> StPO which is not the same as an acquittal (no "Freispruch") which I
> eventually accepted. It means, however, that I won't have to pay for the
> trial. They also repeatedly said that this time I got off with just a
> slap
> on the wrist - next time it wouldn't be that cheap.
> 
> Yeah, and that's it. I am completely disappointed by the way this court
> trial was held. I don't know if this is how they usually do it here in
> Southern Germany. When I was a lay assessor, we always treated the
> defendants with some kind of respect - not only but especially if there
> was
> no actual evidence that they had committed a crime. But the public
> prosecutor as well as the judge both repeatedly showed me their
> disrespect -
> because I didn't confess anything, because I was not thankful for their
> offer, because I still operate this criminal thing they obviously had no
> clue about.
> 
> Okay, signing off for now.
> 
> Bye, K&K,
> T-Zee
> -- 
> |Mirko Thiesen          "We're with you all the way, mostly"|
> |Mirko.Thiesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    | http://www.kyb.mpg.de/ |
> |MPI for Biological Cybernetics    | Phone: +49-7071-601-638|
> |Spemannstr. 38, D-72076 Tuebingen | FAX:   +49-7071-601-616|
-- 
  
  mark485anderson@xxxxxx

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