Josef Fritzl on trial....

[georgimama]

I don't think a defence lawyer has ever had a tougher gig. Opening statements in mitigation include:

?My client is not a monster. He is a man who wanted a second family and wanted to care for that second family.

?If it was just rape, sexual lust, then he wouldn?t have wanted children, or he could have used contraception. Or if he just didn?t care and had the children, he could have just got rid of them.

?But this was a man who cared for his family and spent Christmas with them.?

AND

?He could have just abandoned them all, killed them all and continued his life in Amstetten as a respectable businessman. No-one would have known. He would have gone to his grave with a message on his tombstone: ?Here lies a respectable man?.

He said that Elizabeth, who had supposedly run away to join a cult, had left them on the doorstep with a note
And apparently the fact that he had previously been in prison for rape did not stop him being approved as an adoptive parent.

God thats awful.

He has just entered a guilty plea to all charges.

A minute spark of humanity after all, perhaps.

At least now he will almost certainly die behind bars.

there are apparently concerns about his mental state...

Just heard his lawyer say "he's not normal" about his mental health, so I guess he's having a roguh ride of it.

I hope he gets life and it MEANS life.

His lawyer's line seems to be that yesterday really was the FIRST TIME Fritzl actually realised he had done something very bad and he no longer had a family. It seems incredible but I suppose if he kept his family in such a state of subjection that they never dared criticise or stand up to him he might have actually enabled himself to maintain this state of delusion.

But he seemed to have convinced himself that he was somehow a decent upstanding member of the community.

Of course at some level he must have known it was wrong because he concealed it, but it does look like he had some kind of doublethink going on whereby he thought he deserved some credit for feeding the family, bringing them Xmas presents etc.

he can't have been normal though. What he did was terrible beyond words, but I agree that he must have been living in some sort of delusion where he genuinely believed that he had done nothing wrong.

He should never be let out, but his behavior was not that of a normal person.

He isn't normal, and I would imagine he is mentally ill. He must have sufficient comprehension of his actions and the meaning of right and wrong to be deemed fit to stand trial though.

Not a criminal lawyer as I said, but from early law studies days I remember reading case law that the bar (certainly in the UK) for whether a person is deemed culpable for murder in terms of capacity is not set very high. If they have sufficient comprehension to know what they actually did (as in "I was stabbing the man" rather than "I was driving to Whitstable for a seaside holiday") and to know that what they did was likely to kill someone, then that is murder. McNaughten rules I think it was called - don't know if that precedent is still good law though.

He could be evil and ill, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

"I think he just didn't want the whole story coming out. What was said was bad enough yesterday. "

Agreeed, dittany. What else might have been revealed

Apparently Elisabeth has been in court - he has seen her - & that's what made him change his plea.

Telegraph

But seeing her videotaped evidence was probably part of it too. She would never have dared stand up to him face-to-face before so he probably convinced himself that it was all right really

It's awful to hear about the physical problems the children have

So.
He got life and was found guilty on all counts which is good, obviously.
But apparently there is not going to be any kind of an inquiry into how social services and the police managed to not notice that anything was going on.
This sucks IMO - obviously no-one but Fritzl is to blame for his crimes, but you would think an investigation into how no-one managed to notice would be worth doing.

I find it so depressing that so many crimes against women, particularly sex crimes, were ultimately preventable in that it's only because the perpetrator was treated so leniently for previous crimes that it was able to escalate to that level. Eg. Fritzl's rape conviction being erased from the record, Peter Tobin being let out of prison and murdering Angelika Kluk. Or the London cab driver rapist getting away with so many rapes because reports to police were basically ignored.