Young, old, thick, thin, highly educated or low literate: in the court in Den Bosch all colors of society pass by. Even with a theme day that the Public Prosecution Service holds every two months in East Brabant. They are four sessions in a row, this Friday. Four moral cases, for the police judge. And all four times with one man.
It goes from ‘dirty males’, to someone who commits a mistake under the influence of drugs and psychological suffering, until someone who loses a conductor out of anger. They all pass by during a theme day.
“Especially since it is a bit more efficient, for a specialized public prosecutor,” explains a spokesperson for the OM. This can be about waste rules, but also about assault. Like this ‘theme afternoon’.
The day starts with a fifty -year -old man from Eindhoven, who secretly smoked cigarettes with his eighteen -year -old colleague in an isolation cell of their work. They both worked as a cleaner at GGZ and had a ‘not very good’ understanding, but that did not stop the suspect from what dirty talks.
He bombarded his young colleague with stories about sex with his wife, sex before marriage and his erections. “He’s getting hard,” he told her. “Come on, we have to go back to work,” the victim responded with dumbness.
“Just blowjob, boy.”
But if he has to wait too long for her, he gets angry. He kicks her leg, sits on her buttocks, grabs her breasts and zippers his pants open. And although the whole conversation with an interpreter is in Arabic, his own words sound crystal clear in Dutch through the session room. “Blowjob, boy,” he repeats his own words. “Just blowjob, boy.”
He says it was a joke. But they are not served by those jokes in court. “You will be sentenced to 14 days in prison, of which 13 days are conditional. For if you take another ‘joke’, the judge judges. A 120 -hour work sentence is added.
The room runs empty, but the first session has ended considerably. The interpreter was in a traffic jam. After waiting an hour and a half, a blood -nervous man comes in, with a brightly colored cap and a lawyer on his side. “I waited almost two years for this day. I really suffered from it,” he says in tears. There is relief, excitement and a lot of sorrow from his story. It is a chapter that he wants to close very, very much.
“I was in a kind of intoxication, it was a dream,” he looks back on the day of his offense. It was just after closing time, at a festival in Wanroij, when he had completely swallowed and drank himself. Starend, he stood watching a woman. “Do you know him?”, Her friends asked, after which he grabbed her left breast. Then he did the same with another woman, with whom he asked for a fire.
“I was psychotic,” the suspect says in court on Friday. He was deep in depression, came back from a burnout, had a drug addiction and had been homeless for years. Just as the COVID period drew a heavy switch for many, this suspect dropped into a deep, black hole.
And he is certainly not proud of that. But his crime in Wanroij made an impression. “Then I started looking for help,” he says. The man has apologized to the victims, donated to a charity for women, has sought professional help and has changed jobs. “You don’t make me happy with an office job, even if my mathematician training is perfect for that.” Now he’s cook, somewhere the middle of nowhere In Germany.
“He is not a suspect as you usually see, with sex offenses,” says his lawyer. And the court already realized that. “Throughout my career I have rarely had a suspect for me who has had so much self -insight, as you”, the judge responds. “You deserve a compliment for that.” So it stays with a work sentence instead of the prison sentence.
“Go away, what the fuck?”
With the head held high, the man leaves the courtroom, followed by case number three. It is a 74-year-old man who sat on the cross of a 22-year-old woman during a bus ride. He dropped his public transport card, bent over and grabbed his hand under her skirt. “Go away, what the fuck?“, the victim shouted. Since then she no longer only dares to leave the house.
“My life has changed forever,” says the young woman. She came to the session with her family to tell her part of the story. And although she immediately appeals to the old man, he does not shrink.
“Disgust, nausea, headache, tense jaws, nightmares, difficulty with intimacy …”, she sums up. “They are all things that a young woman of 22 should not be concerned with. Complaints that had not been necessary if you had known that you should not just sit on a woman.”
“That I will get justice is of great importance to me,” said the victim. Whether she received that is a question that she takes out of the session room. The man has to go to prison for a month.
Finally, two people enter the session room in an NS uniform. They take a seat behind the suspect, a 39-year-old man, who says he has been fooled away during a train ride. He was on his way to work in Helmond and had forgotten his public transport card.
When the main conductor wrote a fine, he became angry. He touched her cross, laughed and walked away. After that, the condUtrice stayed at home for a few days. She has a lot of problems with it.
Even if it is not sexual, it is still assault. The woman, who is sitting in the hall with a colleague and her lawyer, actually dares to do her work anymore. She is scared. That is why the perpetrator receives a work sentence of 80 hours, half of which was conditional. “And a quality prison. To prevent you from doing it again,” the judge judges.
With a left face, the woman walks out of the room again. End of theme day.