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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tankin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Professor Jurg Kinzig. Professor Kinzig is the director of the Institute for Criminology at the University of Tubian.
And he is, along with Peter Kirleman, the author of the piece The Aquital, After Pre-Trial Detention, a rare but fascinating phenomenon of criminal justice system. It's published in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice. Professor Kinzig, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me today. Yes, hello.
So let's just get right into it. Your article deals specifically with what you call second class acquittals. Could you define what you mean for our listeners? Yes, well, according to the German Code of Criminal Law, an accused person can either be found guilty and receive a sentence or the accused person can be acquitted.
In the case of an acquittal, the judge then proclaims the accused acquitted of the charges. Okay, well, as we have seen, acquittals may differ in quality. The court may acquit the accused based on the fact that he or she had an airtight alibi for the time of the crime. Or let me give you another example.
The court may also acquit the accused because it is sure that eyewitnesses misidentified the accused due to a close resemblance to the actual perpetrator. Such acquittals, which are based on the actual innocence of the accused, are what we call first class acquittals. In our research, however, we found these first class acquittals in only 5% of the cases we analyzed. Hence, they are pretty rare.
And the so-called second class, acquittals are much more common in Germany. Second class, acquittals are equidals on the basis of the universal principle of indubio pro-reo, meaning when in doubt, then for the accused. In such cases, the court must interpret doubts in the assessment of the evidence in favor of the accused as it cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused committed the crime question. Second class, acquittals are therefore problematic to a certain degree.
We call it the acquitted person. We will have to live with the stigma of being acquitted supposedly only because the evidence was not convincing enough or a conviction. Contrary to the US court system, acquittals in German courts have to be profoundly substantiated by the court. As a prime example, to illustrate a second class acquittal in the German sense, one can think of the famous and widely publicized OG Simms murder trial.
We all know that Simms was eventually acquitted of the murder charges. However, even after he's acquittal, many people were still convinced that Simms was guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. So just listening to you talk and having read your paper, it's clear that you see the acquittal as kind of a particular phenomenon in German law. And so I was wondering how you came to see it as deserving of special attention.
And also you write that it's quote unquote shady. And I was hoping that you could tell us a bit about what you mean by that. Yeah, and our paper we talk about the acquittal as a shady existence in German criminal law and also in criminal logical research. We wanted to express that up until now, research on the acquittals in Germany at least is well, rarely undertaken.
And we aimed to change that with our research project. For example, it is possible that someone gets arrested, has to spend a couple of months in pretrial detention only to be eventually acquitted of the charges at the end of the trial. In fact, in Germany, this happens to roughly 300 people every year. But in order to be put in pretrial detention, one has to be strongly suspected of having committed the crime question.
Therefore, we wanted to find out how it is possible that someone is first strongly suspected of having committed the crime only to be eventually acquitted at the end of the trial due to the evidence not being strong enough for a conviction. So one of our research questions was, are there cases in which such a procedure is likely to occur? And based on our research, we now know that acquittals after pretrial detention are especially common in cases involving some form of sexual violence or rape. This has to do with the lack of hard evidence as such cases are most often so readily dependent on the testimony of the accused and the supposed victim.
A recent example for this is the Harvey Weinstein trial. While he was convicted of felony sex crime and rape, he was at the same time acquitted of the charges of predatory sexual assault as the jury apparently did not believe the testimony of the actress who accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her. So let's, I mean, following up on that, you also write about this idea that acquittal is an error correction but really digging down or making explicit in your research, was that what an acquittal turned out to be? I think according to your research is an acquittal error correction.
Yes, one of the goals of our research project was the description of the acquittal as a phenomenon and its potential for errors. An error in this context can lead to innocent people being held in pretrial detention and having to, with extensive court trials before being acquitted. Actually, we found formal opposition errors made by judicial authorities in only 5% of the court cases that eventually ended with an acquittal. Formal or procedural errors such as the accused not being read their rights did not play a significant role in the cases that we analyzed.
This fits well with the results from the interview that we conducted with judges and prosecutors. Instead of seeing acquittals as errors of failings of the criminal justice system, our interviewees argued that the quidals are proof of a well-functioning criminal justice system in Germany. In fact, in cases in which the accused remains in pretrial detention, the prosecutors invested in the cases even more thoroughly. The ability of error is fairly low according to our interviewees.
Additionally, there is a relatively high threshold that has to be met in order for pretrial detention to be granted or the aim is to prevent the random or unjustified implementation of pretrial detention. While such errors were relatively rare in all the cases we analyzed, the interviewees brought other potential errors to our attention. According to their experience, problems include the question of trustworthiness of statements made by victims, witnesses, while understand and the difficult decision-making process in he said or she said that constellations. He said, she said, constellations are especially common in cases involving any form of sexual violence and the interviewees name this as the main reason for the high number of acquittals in such cases.
Your work is so relevant and so significant and the cases that you've been talking about today clearly continue to have not just a relevance but an urgency in societies around the world, you're looking at the German system. I was wondering if you could speak a bit about where you would like to see this research out, either where you yourself would like to take it or where you think it should take it next by your peers? Actually, we are still conducting research on phenomena that are somehow related to equidals. On the one hand, a dissertation on miscarriages of justice was recently completed at our institute.
While the actual amount of miscarriages of justice in our German court system remains unclear, we are sure they do exist. Interesting though, there appears to be no real desire to study the reasons why these happen, but that probably has to do with the fact that we as lawyers not only like to be right, but in law school, we are also trained to be right. These carriages of justice make us realize that we can't be right all the time. On the other hand, our institute is part of a German white collaboration project that is currently conducting research on the German equivalent of plea bargaining in criminal cases.
A couple of years now, the so-called Feschländigung in Schraffa van, plea bargaining in criminal cases is regulated by law in Germany. So while this law allows for plea bargaining in the form that the accused receives a more lenient sentence in exchange for a confession, it prohibits prosecutors and also courts from making guarantees on the exact length of the sentence, for example, five years. In our project, we are currently trying to find out whether all parties involved act according to this law or whether they still agree to and guarantee specific sentences of the books, so to speak. The results from this research, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Justice, could potentially lead to a modification of the current specifications of the Feschländigung CZ, the law in plea bargaining in the German court system.
Fascinating and, again, no shortage of real-world implications. I've been speaking with Professor Dr. Jörg Kinsig, he is the Director of the Institute for Criminology at the University of Jübegen, and we've been speaking about the piece that he co-wrote with Peter Kölleman. It's in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice, and it is called the acquittal after pretrial detention, a rare but fascinating phenomenon of the criminal justice system.
Again, Professor Kinsig, thank you so much for your time today. You can now find the Humanities Matter podcast by Brill on Spotify, Apple, or Google. That was my last episode as the host of Humanities Matter by Brill. I have learned so much over the past few months by speaking to the authors of these various publications.
We learned about world education and the Ottoman period and about the ethics of dog breeding and about who was really the subject of a photograph that was thought to be, since I've been going for a long time, but spoiler, it was not. I am this doing this. Lee, do you want to tell our listeners in whose excellent hands the podcast will be? Yeah, thanks very much, Emily, and really excited to hear what's next for Brill.
I'm a freelance journalist based in DC. I've covered politics and culture and defense, so I'm really excited to talk to more researchers and more professors and hopefully find out something that's interesting as a who's in that photograph. I'll have to go back and listen to past recordings now to find that. Yeah, and I think the thing that I really appreciate doing about this podcast is that we go about our lives and we write, you know, you and I, in journalism, you go about your day, you write these pieces, you get your bylines out, you stay at top of the days news, and it can be very easy to lose sight of the threads that hold all of it together and that hold all of us together, and at the risk of seeming overly dramatic or cheesy or too earnest, in my opinion, those are the humanities.
So it's been a real privilege to spend some time with our guests and our listeners discussing the humanities and taking a moment to appreciate why they matter. And I hope that or I know that you will appreciate it just as much as I have. I hope so too. Thanks so much, Emily.
Thank you.