Tax lawyer Ernest Louwes continues his struggle to prove his innocence in the Deventer murder case. His lawyer Geert-Jan Knoops announced this Monday de Volkskrant submitted a new review request based on an investigation by Amsterdam detectives from the cold case team.
Based on the same investigation, the Supreme Court announced last month that the Solicitor General who conducted the investigation for the past eight yearssees no reason for revision.
In the Deventer Murder Case, Louwes was first acquitted and then convicted in 2001 for the murder of the widow Wittenberg in 1999. In 2003 the case was referred back by the Supreme Court, after it became apparent that the police and the judiciary had made serious mistakes and that important information was missing. withheld.
In 2004, Louwes was convicted on the basis of DNA evidence during a new trial at the court in Den Bosch. The genetic evidence was found in Louwes’ blood and touch marks on the shirt of the murdered widow that had not been previously examined for DNA. That evidence also came under public discussion through research by opinion pollster Maurice de Hond, who, with a lot of media attention, pointed to another person as a murderer.
Widow Wittenberg
Lawyer Knoops went along with this by, for example, successfully demanding in summary proceedings that the grave of the widow Wittenberg be opened, because Maurice de Hond thought that the real perpetrator would have hidden the murder weapon there. It led to nothing, as an earlier review request from Knoops to have the case reopened in 2009 was already rejected.
It focused on the same fundamental questions as those now in the research on which de Volkskrant write, be called. Namely the question of how likely it is that just before the murder Louwes had a telephone conversation at a great distance from the widow while a transmission tower placed him in the vicinity of the crime scene. And the question of how reliable the DNA evidence is since the blouse on which it was found had not been stored in accordance with the regulations.
Read also the review of the film from 2021 about the Deventer murder case
New details
Despite these questions, which were discussed in detail, the court and later in review the Supreme Court designated Louwes as the murderer. In 2014, the Advocate General at the Supreme Court still started his investigation on the basis of questions from Knoops, after an amendment to the law had made such an investigation possible in a closed case. That investigation was completed last month, so according to the attorney general, without consequences.
Knoops now believes that with new details from this investigation, namely that detectives had previously shown that a telephone can actually click on a transmission tower over a great distance, they can still force a review. The Supreme Court will have to assess how new this is, because the very first criminal file from 1999 already contains a statement from telecom company KPN that ‘the theoretical maximum achievable distance’ is so great that Louwes’ own statement about the telephone conversation could be correct.
Incidentally, any convicted person in any criminal case can submit a request for review at any time, without this changing the formal ‘irrevocable’ status of a criminal case. This only happens if the Supreme Court grants such a review request, which is a rarity.