Comment by BonesJustice
9 years ago
...and your point is?
You do not need to convict or even formally charge someone in order to have chilling effect on speech; when the police investigate you for a crime, and the mere possibility of being charged and convicted hangs over your head, you will think twice about what you say.
And while I know little about German jurisprudence, I do know that prosecutors in this country do not need to attain a conviction in order to destroy someone's life. Once a prosecutor claims you are guilty, plenty of people will believe it no matter the outcome, and that's on top of depleting your life savings on legal representation. I urge everyone to keep this in mind when contemplating how European-style hate speech laws (or any proposed laws) would play out in the United States.
The stats I linked above suggest a clearance rate of 89% for criminal insult investigations. While that number dwarfs the 56% average clearance rate for criminal investigations across Germany, it is unclear to me whether those figures describe how many investigations led to convictions, indictments, a suspect being formally charged, or merely the positive identification of a suspect. I believe the term generally refers to the proportion of investigations that lead to a suspect being formally charged, but I wasn't certain, so I left that figure out.
Feel free to dig deeper.
My point is that those cases are the result of people reporting them to the authorities, who are then obliged to investigate. That the vast majority of them go nowhere is a good indication that the system works, in a country with 10's of millions of people with a single digit percentage of fringe elements you'd expect roughly that number of reports (actually, somewhat more).
What evidence do you offer to support the notion that "the vast majority of [criminal insult investigations in Germany] go nowhere"?
Going by the most common definition of 'clearance rate', around 208k of those 234k investigations led, at minimum, to someone being formally charged with a crime. Frankly, that in itself is horrifying.
How many people are charged is not relevant, what is relevant is how many people are convicted. A charge being cleared means that the accusation had some basis in fact clearing the minimum bar for the authorities to formally charge someone.
Given the total number of people in Germany and the size of the fringe this number is not at all horrifying but in fact in line with expectations. It is on the rise but this is a reflection of the fact that in Western Europe the number of ultra-right wing supporters is on the rise.