Trial and Conviction
After German reunification in October 1990, Mielke was arrested and charged with the 1931 murders of police Captains Anlauf and Lenck. Much of the evidence used at his trial was taken from the files of the original investigation, which were found in Mielke's personal safe after the dissolution of the Stasi.
According to John Koehler,
"Defenders of Mielke would later claim that confessions had been obtained under torture by the Nazi Gestapo. However, all suspects were in the custody of the regular Berlin city criminal investigation bureau, most of whose detectives were SPD members. Some of the suspects had been nabbed by Nazi SA men and probably beaten before they were turned over to police. In the 1993 trial of Mielke, the court gave the defense the benefit of the doubt and threw out a number of suspect confessions."
Despite all this wrangling, Mielke was convicted of both murders and in October 1993 was sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He was paroled after less than two, and in 1998 all further legal action against him was ended on the grounds of his poor health.
Read more about this topic: Erich Mielke
Famous quotes containing the words trial and/or conviction:
“I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)