As of: March 7, 2024, 4:42 p.m
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The accused ex-football coach in the courtroom of the regional court with his lawyer Peter Guttmann.
© Britta Schultejans/dpa
153 rapes, 488 sexual assaults: An ex-coach has to spend seven and a half years in prison because he sexually assaulted young footballers for years.
The public prosecutor had called for a harsher punishment.
Munich - “It's crazy when you imagine it,” says presiding judge Stephan Kirchinger.
And the scale of the crime shocked even hardened investigators: the Munich I regional court sentenced a former football coach to seven and a half years in prison for hundreds of sexual assaults and 153 rapes.
Contrary to what the public prosecutor's office requested, the court did not impose subsequent preventive detention against the 47-year-old.
He had confessed to having sexually assaulted young footballers from his club for years.
The court - also unlike the public prosecutor's office - did not see the crime as sexual abuse of those under protection because the victims were not entrusted to the defendant "to monitor their lifestyle," as Judge Kirchinger says.
“Absolute borderline cases”
The public prosecutor's office, which had demanded eight years in prison, had charged more than 800 cases of abuse and sexual assault, but the court classified the acts as sexual assault, not abuse of those under protection, in 488 cases.
However, Kirchinger speaks of “absolute borderline cases” in the acts that took place, for example, in the training camp, far away from the young people’s parents.
The former head coach and sporting director of a club in the Munich district had admitted in court that he had sexually assaulted the teenagers during alleged physiotherapeutic treatments and had also raped them in numerous cases.
According to the public prosecutor's office, he carried out sexual acts on the young footballers according to a pattern that was always the same on a massage table in the football club's dressing room, at the training camp or in his house and stated that this allegedly served to improve blood circulation in the muscles.
The confession was part of a so-called deal between all those involved in the case, who had agreed on a maximum sentence of eight years if the defendant admitted the crimes.
The defendant abused the trust that the young footballers placed in him and his position in the club, acted “methodically and systematically and perfidiously,” and created a “perfidious system.”
“He groomed victims to abuse them,” the prosecutor said in her plea.
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The public prosecutor demanded preventive detention
He was “a dangerous serial offender” - that was how she justified her demand for subsequent preventive detention.
He reminds her “of a cult leader.”
He is a “classic, gifted and power-hungry human catcher”.
There is - she based her assessment on an expert's assessment - a possible danger that his own sons will one day become his victims.
The defense firmly rejected this assumption.
Judge Kirchinger said: "We still see the defendant's dangerousness as a given." But he emphasized: "We do not see this hurdle having been reached yet." The court believes that the prison sentence can ensure that the man does not have to is more dangerous.
The former coach himself apologized to his former players in his last word.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
“I definitely want to work through the whole story through therapy.” His defense lawyers had argued for a seven-year prison sentence and against preventive detention.
“I would like to have a future and a perspective that I can live with my family,” said the defendant.
“I just want to be there for her.”
In a similar case, a 27-year-old soccer coach was sentenced to 4 years and 3 months in prison at the Potsdam Regional Court on Wednesday.
The man had forced some boys into sexual acts in a community in Brandenburg for years in his role as a trainer.
dpa