In 2000 Meiwes posted a message saying, “I am looking for a young, well-built man aged 18 to 30 to slaughter”. They also brought to light the fact that Brandes was not capable of making any decisions on the evening of 9 March, as he had consumed significant amounts of alcohol and drugs to numb the pain of his penis amputation.On, a court in Frankfurt convicted Meiwes of murder and changed his initial eight and a half year sentence to life imprisonment.
The retrial began on 12 January 2006, where prosecutors questioned the actual reasoning for Brandes’ killing as being a way to satisfy Meiwes' own sexual desires, rather than obliging Brandes his request. Their argument was that he should have been convicted of murder, not manslaughter, and been given a life sentence. It also proved problematic for German lawyers who discovered that cannibalism is in fact legal in Germany and subsequently charged Meiwes with murder for the purposes of sexual pleasure and with 'disturbing the peace of the dead'.At the trial, 19 minutes of the video showing key moments of the crime was shown to the court, after reporters and the public were removed.Only a year later, in April 2005, a German court ordered that there should be a retrial, after prosecutors appealed Meiwes' sentence as being too lenient. While these details are sufficiently abhorrent to shock even jaded observers, the actual events that transpired following the recruitment of a willing subject were even more bizarre and blood-curdling.On 30 January 2004, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.The case attracted considerable media attention and started a debate over whether Meiwes could be convicted at all, due to the fact that Brandes had voluntarily taken part in the cannibalism and had entered Meiwes' house fully aware of his intentions. In this regard, Meiwes stated that, “I always had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it” (as cited in Harding, 2003, para.
Armin meiwes video summary trial#
In his explanation for this gruesome series of events, Meiewes simply advised that court on the first day of his murder trial that after the death of his mother in 1999, eating a person became an obsession. As part of their mutual agreement, Brandes also agreed to be butchered and eaten by Meiwes, which the latter proceeded to do, freezing part of the body for later consumption (Harding, 2003).įollowing a period of several months, Meiwes was subsequently arrested by German police and was charged and convicted for manslaughter, despite the absence of German laws against cannibalism per se (Cannibalism overview, 2018) At the prosecutor’s request, Meiwes received a retrial at which point he was convicted of murder for “the purposes of sexual pleasure and fro disturbing the peace of the dead” (Harding, 2003). While this mutually agreed upon arrangement seems truly bizarre on its face (and it was), the grisly story does not end there. The legal record shows that Armin Meiwes was a quiet, otherwise-pleasant 42-year-old German man from Rotenburg described by local residents who knew him casually as “the perfect neighbor” who, in 2001, located an individual, a. The facts of this case are not in dispute.
Finally, a summary of the research and key findings about the Meiwes cannibalism case are presented in the conclusion. To gain some insights into this event, this paper examines the facts about this case to determine why and what happened as well as how it happened and what occurred afterwards. It was against this backdrop that the gruesome circumstances that involved Armin Meiwes, a middle-aged German man was convicted by German courts of recruiting a consensual volunteer on a fetish Web site strictly for the purposes of butchering and eating him. Indeed, even in extreme cases such as the stranded Donner party where survival was at stake, cannibalism is universally regarded as morally and legally wrong. Although some primitive societies have engaged in the practice – and some purportedly still do – the proscription against cannibalism is so ubiquitous and powerful that national governments have not felt compelled to enact legislation outlawing the practice because existing laws concerning murder and the longstanding natural prohibitions against eating other people are regarded as being sufficient. One of the fundamental taboos that has characterized the human condition since time immemorial is eating human flesh.