Child pornography: 22-year-old Bad Wörishofer in court for WhatsApp message

• ofJessica Socher

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Bad Wörishofen / Memmingen – A young Bad Wörishofer had to answer in court this week for accessing and possessing child pornography. Despite doubts on the part of the judge, he was acquitted.

The prosecutor had accused the 22-year-old of having accessed and owned child pornographic content. The files were sent to Bad Wörishofer in a WhatsApp group with 40 other members. According to his defense lawyer, the group was only created to arrange evening meetings. Ultimately, however, all kinds of things were sent there – including depictions of violence and pornographic content. The files for which Bad Wörishofer was now on trial were a video and a photo that showed sexual acts by and on children.

The defendant himself did not testify. His defense attorney explained that the 22-year-old found the content repulsive and did not want the files at all, whereupon he deleted them immediately after they were automatically saved. The defendant “never wants to have this automatic saving again”, as his defense attorney announced.

Police came across the banned video by accident

Two police officers who had actually investigated another case and then accidentally came across the pornographic photo and video material, testified as witnesses at the trial in the district court. They originally investigated a drug case involving another member of the WhatsApp group. At the end of July 2019, this member was searched and the cell phone was seized. During its evaluation, one of the officers who wanted to get a “rough overview” came across a folder containing the child pornographic video.

He then reported the find to the Memmingen police and handed the smartphone over to the criminal police. The other police officer then also found the WhatsApp chat, where he tried to find out who had sent the child pornographic content, who was in the group at the time and what reactions were received. The investigator found that the defendant had responded to the child pornographic content with a text message. It was therefore clear that he had noticed and viewed the content. However, it could not be proven whether the 22-year-old had deleted the files or not, as the defendant’s cell phone was never seized and evaluated.

The defendant was ultimately acquitted because it could not be proven that he wanted to view and save the child pornographic content. The gut feeling of the judge Barbara Roßdeutscher said otherwise, but that was not enough due to the lack of evidence. Both defense lawyers and prosecutors considered the acquittal to be appropriate.

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