The court overturns the ruling issued against Jerome Boateng

The Bavarian Supreme Court overturned the conviction of former German national footballer Jerome Boateng on charges of bodily harm and insult.

It upheld the appeal of the 2014 world champion as well as that of the prosecutor and co-plaintiff on Thursday and referred the proceedings back to the Munich First Regional Court. The process should now restart there.

Boateng’s lawyer, Leonard Valiszewski, had previously called for the ruling issued last October to be overturned. “The process was shockingly unfair,” he said. “Defendant Boateng was finally convicted before the appeal process even began.”

At the time, Boateng, now 35, was handed a second fine of 120 daily rates of €10,000 each for assault and insult for assaulting his ex-girlfriend on holiday in the Caribbean – a total of €1.2 million. .

Boateng’s right to a fair trial was violated at the time, and Waliszewski criticized. The lawyer said: “The president of the court was not impartial, and he was not distant.”

Above all, he criticized the judge’s own involvement in rejecting the request for bias against him. The court also found on Thursday that this was a decisive reason to overturn the ruling “completely.”

At the time, before filing the prejudice motion, the presiding judge asserted that additional evidence presented by Boateng and his lawyers could have a negative impact on the sentence. Boateng’s lawyer accused the judge of “unprocedural and arbitrary conduct” in his argument on Thursday. “The president does not want to clarify.”

The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Public Prosecution Office also appealed against the ruling because they demanded conviction on charges of grievous bodily harm and thus a harsher sentence. The Bavarian Supreme Court also upheld their appeal.

The court’s decision makes an already very long legal dispute even longer. The Munich District Court had already imposed a larger fine on Boateng in 2021, but the number of daily fares was only half that amount – 60 daily fares worth €30,000 each, for a total of €1.8 million. Those convicted of more than 90 per day are considered to have a criminal record.

Boateng, who played for the German national team and Bayern Munich for a long time, was bid farewell by his last club, French top-flight football team Olympique Lyonnais, in June and is currently without a club.

(Yam/Sada/Daba)

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