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Five months due to wrongful death and negligent bodily injury, not final.
Vienna A 22-year-old police officer was sentenced to five months in probation for negligent manslaughter and negligent battery on Wednesday in Favoriten District Court. The young officer caused a traffic accident on August 29, 2019 during a trip to Vienna-Favoriten at the Äußere Favoritenstraße – Altes Landgut intersection, in which a 35-year-old pedestrian was killed. Three other people and the defendant himself were injured.
Judge Ulrike Fehringer assumed, after an extensive evidentiary process with three days of negotiations, that the police officer had entered the crossing area at excessive speed and without having permanently activated the secondary horn. According to court findings, it did not stop in front of the traffic lights on the stop line, as prescribed, and did not ensure that it was possible to continue driving in the busy intersection with red lights without endangering other road users. route. Only under this condition would the emergency vehicle have been allowed to cross the intersection in red.
The result was a violent collision
The result was a violent collision with a car, it was a Jaguar, in which both vehicles were thrown to one side. The police car crashed into an electrical box and struck a bystander who died at the scene of the accident. The driver of the Jaguar and the defendant suffered minor injuries, while two fellow police officers who were traveling with him, including a police student, suffered concussions and abrasions, a dislocation of the right shoulder and a whiplash.
The judgment is not final. Defense attorneys Alfred Boran and Mathias Burger asked for time to think about it, prosecutor Fridolin Moritz did not give an explanation at the moment. If so, what professional consequences there will be for the 22-year-old official must be decided internally by the police. The official loss of office in the case of crime due to negligence is excluded.
Ultimately, the deciding factor for the guilty verdict was the report by traffic engineering expert Christoph Schmidt. It was able to show that the company vehicle was traveling at more than 50 kilometers per hour at the time the airbag was activated, which Schmidt called “relatively excessive speed.” Due to local conditions, the defendant could not have a complete view of the intersection area and therefore should have entered this area “at a much slower speed,” the expert found. The driver of the Jaguar “de facto had no way of avoiding the collision,” explained Schmidt, who was also convinced that, contrary to what the official said, the following horn was not heard at the time of the collision. As Schmidt emphasized, from the defendant’s point of view, it would have been necessary to stop again immediately before the traffic light or to reduce speed.
Multiple due diligence violations
Based on the expert witness’s statements, the judge certified that the defendant had had several violations of due diligence in her trial. In addition to the excessive speed, it was “incomprehensible to her why the next horn tone was not activated permanently at this intersection at 4:00 pm when there was a corresponding volume of traffic,” he noted.
The parents of the murdered teacher, who had joined the criminal process as private individuals, were referred to civil law with their complaints. Her legal representative, Fritz Wennig, had indicated at the end of the hearing that the police operation that cost the Ukrainian her life had been a fight: “No knife, no weapon. There was no rush.” The defendants “drove so fast for no reason. If the police arrive a minute later, they may have a black eye. No more.” In this sense, the parents “could not understand the death of their daughter and still cannot face it,” Wennig said.
Defense attorney Alfred Boran concluded that his client “had already been punished by the trial” and had to think “often” about the victim. The police officer found himself “in an extremely stressful situation” and “did his best.” In the future, the officer would have to “drive a little better, but keep driving with commitment. We need people like you,” Boran said.
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