The jury returned a guilty verdict of defamation, false testimony, slander, insult and falsification of evidence. In case of doubt, the 38-year-old was acquitted of charges of dangerous threats and incitement to abuse of office. The judgment is not final. The trained waiter had previously spent around two months in custody, which will be credited to him.
“Hatscher Confession”
According to the judge, the native of Welser had made a “cheated” confession, which the lay judges evaluated as a mitigating, partly remorseful confession, aggravating the coincidence of several offenses. The defender waived appeals, the public prosecutor’s office made no statement.
“With his criticism of state measures, the accused far exceeded what is permissible in a democracy,” the prosecutor said. It all started in February 2021 after a demonstration against the Corona measures in Rohrbach. The accused provoked officers at a police inspection and later testified as a witness that he had been injured by a police officer, his mobile phone had been destroyed and his shirt torn. This corresponds to slander and false testimony.
Conflicts with police and authorities
From May to July 2021, the accused was repeatedly involved in serious conflicts with the police and authorities. Essentially, he threatened officials. According to the indictment, the 38-year-old asked the officials to stop their actions, which he considered illegal. He therefore threatened the employees of the district administration and also a judge of the regional administrative court to publish their personal data and sent them liability declarations, according to which they would be personally liable for their official actions.
To this end, he published videos and documents with the names of the officials on social networks, and in the videos he also asked others to do the same, to denounce officials, to publish their data and to send them private declarations of liability. The length of the crime period and “the vehemence of the attacks shows that the actions were well thought out and the accused aimed to take chances,” said the prosecutor.
The state of Upper Austria, as a private party, joined the proceedings with a request for an injunction to refrain from such actions in the future. The defendant signed the cease-and-desist declaration during the proceedings.
“A Fight Determined by Anger”
Defense attorney Werner Tomanek described the matter as “deppad” and expressed his astonishment that his client managed “to rouse the concentrated state power in Linz and the Urfahr area against him in three months”. In Vienna he had already received completely different threats than the accused had given the authorities, but “if we are so sensitive…”. The lawyer referred to the defendant’s intact environment and said: “He did it, he doesn’t want it again” in relation to the pre-trial detention.
The accused, who is currently under investigation under the Prohibition Act, pleaded partially guilty, he made a confession of fact. When asked by the judge whether that would have paid off, he said: “No, absolutely not, quite the opposite.” The judge clarified with the accused the functions and processes in the constitutional state. “The mistake was that I went into a fight driven by anger,” said the man. In one week he received 18 Rsa letters that he was desperate and felt threatened. He took the sample form for the personal declaration of liability from an acquaintance.
“Will learn a lesson”
“I will learn from the whole thing to direct my life differently,” said the accused. The accused apologized “sincerely” to the judge of the state administrative court and a lawyer from the district administration, whom he had threatened and whose name he had published on the Internet, and vowed that something like this “won’t happen again”. Both accepted the apology.
The administrative judge described it as “unfortunate” to have his name spread on the Internet, especially since the video that was played in the court showed a connection to National Socialism. In the video, the accused complained that he was not allowed into the house for a hearing before the state administrative court because he was not wearing a mask. In the video, he described a corona measure as “re-activation, because in the Third Reich there was also a curfew for Jews,” with the judge’s name and the word “re-activation” deleted in a second version of the video.
The prosecutor asked for a conviction on the full scale of the charges, the defense attorney asked for a sense of proportion in the sentence.
Source: Nachrichten
