When called upon, a doctor is said to have issued thousands of certificates exempting him from the obligation to wear a mask and thus made a lot of money. The Weinheim District Court has now closed the case.
Weinheim (dpa/lsw) - In one of the largest trials for false mask certificates during the corona pandemic, a court sentenced a doctor to two years and nine months in prison - there are 4247 cases involved. According to the director of the Weinheim district court, it also imposed a temporary professional ban on Monday and ordered that around 28,000 euros be confiscated. In addition, the court sentenced an employee to a fine. More than 100 people demonstrated before the trial near Mannheim. They held signs that read, among other things, "Human dignity has been violated! When will you rise up?".
According to the court, the money confiscated was the sum that the doctor received from the recipients for the preparation of the certificates. Nationwide, people would have ordered and received appropriate certificates – without the doctor examining them or even having knowledge of any previous illnesses. There were also no patient files. "The process is more reminiscent of a sale of certificates than a medical measure," the statement said.
In the case of the employees, the court assumed that the woman "was instructed to do the crime by her superior and presumably could only have fulfilled her legal obligation if she had given up her job". Therefore, it found a fine of 90 daily rates of 30 euros to be sufficient and refrained from imprisonment on probation. The judgment is not final.
According to the prosecution, the background to the certificates issued was the political attitude of the doctor from Weinheim in the Rhein-Neckar district. The 59-year-old considers the statutory corona-related restrictions to be inappropriate and unconstitutional. In particular, the accused repeatedly spoke out publicly at demonstrations and the video platform YouTube against the obligation to wear a face mask. She also confessed to this in court.
The woman was defended by Heidelberg lawyer Beate Bahner, a well-known critic of Corona policy. She warned of the medical risks for vaccinated people and legal consequences for vaccinating doctors. The specialist lawyer for medical law had also taken action against the Baden-Württemberg Corona Ordinance in several proceedings at the Administrative Court - always without success. She had also failed with an application for temporary orders against the Corona regulations of all 16 federal states at the Federal Constitutional Court.
The 47-year-old employee of the doctor was represented by the lawyer Ivan Künnemann, who, as the representative of the controversial doctor Bodo Schiffmann, had also rejected allegations that the ear, nose and throat doctor had exempted people from the mask requirement without an examination. Among other things, because of these allegations, the public prosecutor's office in Heidelberg had brought charges against the well-known Sinsheim opponent of vaccination. His wife is also accused of issuing false certificates.
The Weinheim trial was postponed twice at the request of the defense. For the last date on December 12, the defense attorneys claimed that they were unable to stand trial and submitted certificates later.
In mid-November 2022, a doctor was sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence and a fine of 50,000 euros by the Passau Regional Court for issuing false mask certificates to unexamined schoolchildren in 24 cases. This left the judges in the appeal process under the prosecutor's request for a two-year prison sentence without parole and a temporary ban on working.
