After an accident in which four people died in downtown Berlin, the accused driver was sentenced to a suspended sentence of two years.
The Berlin district court found SUV driver Michael M. (45) guilty of negligent homicide and endangering road traffic on Thursday. The court thus went beyond the request of the public prosecutor. The 45-year-old man was driving a month before the accident despite having epilepsy and brain surgery.
The man’s heavy car left Invalidenstraße across the oncoming lane on September 6, 2019. The SUV (SUV, abbreviation for: sport utility vehicle) overturned, killing four people on the sidewalk – a three-year-old and his grandmother, aged 64, and two men, 28 and 29-year-olds.
The court revoked the 45-year-old’s driver’s license and imposed a two-year driver’s license ban – also 15,000 euros as a condition. “He could and should have realized that he was not allowed to get behind the wheel,” the court said.
The case had caused horror nationwide – and quickly triggered a discussion about the dangers in road traffic. Initially, the focus was on whether SUV vehicles are particularly dangerous. In the trial, however, the question of the defendant’s fitness to drive was central and whether an epileptic seizure was foreseeable for him. A terrible accident would probably have happened even with a small car, it said in the process.
From the prosecutor’s point of view, the entrepreneur should not have been driving just a month before the accident because of structural epilepsy and brain surgery. She had applied for a suspended sentence of one year and six months. According to the lawyers, who represented the surviving dependents as joint plaintiffs, the 45-year-old deliberately violated medical requirements.
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At the beginning of the trial at the end of October, the German defendant stated that he was deeply distressed by the suffering caused by his accident. He had an epileptic seizure for the first time in May 2019. With a tumor operation and medication, he then did everything to rule out a second attack.