Dresden. It was the first weekend before the pandemic curfew in March last year. While shopping, Robert W. came across a bottle of “Corona” vodka by chance. He photographed the label and sent it to his wife Irina R. In the evening, this bottle should play a role.
The 49-year-old banker and his 45-year-old wife had drifted apart for a long time. At home, they had slept in separate rooms in their row house in Lockwitz for five years, but they didn’t show that on the outside. Occasionally we went on vacation together. W. is said to have raised his hopes until the end.
On that day, saleswoman Irina R. visited a friend in Bannewitz, Russian-Germans like her. Robert W. picked her up there in the evening, then there should be the vodka. Both apparently enjoyed drinking alcohol again and again. In fact, another photo of the now opened bottle was taken. But that evening it escalated again and the couple got into a heated argument. It was also about their son.
With W’s permission, he should be allowed to stay up late and play on his console. But Irinia R. wanted to send him to bed. It got loud, then W. stabbed once firmly with a kitchen knife. Irina R. succumbed to the consequences in a Dresden clinic at the beginning of April; she could no longer be saved.
A deed in the affect: “That’s enough!”
On Wednesday, W. was sentenced to three years and ten months imprisonment at the Dresden Regional Court for manslaughter. Judge Herbert Pröls, the chairman of the jury, spoke of a less serious case, an act of affect. W. had consumed 2.6 per mille of alcohol, as much as the woman killed.
The court assumes a banal trigger that could not be specifically named. The defendant had probably raised his hopes before another argument broke out, and there was also a dispute about upbringing. According to Pröls, the fact that someone who has been described as “rather phlegmatic” reaches for the knife and stabs it heavily depends on the overall situation in which the man believed himself, according to the motto: “That’s enough!”
Prosecutors had asked for eight years
He immediately recognized what he had done, alerted the police and made a confession on the emergency phone: “I stabbed my wife.” When the officers arrived, he asked her to shoot him. According to Pröls, it was clear to him that this was the end of his bourgeois existence.
W. faced the allegations and admitted the act in court. His defense lawyer Hans Theisen demanded a suspended sentence of a maximum of two years for dangerous bodily harm resulting in death and argued that the woman had “run into his client”. But that is refuted by the forensic medicine report. The public prosecutor, on the other hand, had demanded eight years’ imprisonment for the defendant who had no previous conviction.
