Sometimes you can be there live when legal history is being made. For me it was when a traffic accident ended up in the Berlin district court. In 2016, two young men raced across Kurfürstendamm at 160 km/h and rammed an old man's jeep. The driver died instantly.
Similar cases often ended in court with suspended sentences, sometimes just fines, for involuntary manslaughter. After all, very few speeders want someone to die. The two young men in the dock also just wanted to have a short street race. Just like they had seen in action movies like “The Transporter.” But this time the judiciary asked a few legal-philosophical questions. They didn't start with the accident itself, but in the moments before. Does someone who speeds through the city center not accept that someone will get hurt? Aren't people who engage in street races on the busy Ku'damm acting deeply selfish, i.e. driven by base motives? All of this would indicate that a murder has occurred.
A very emotional process followed. A lot was learned about the suffering of people whose relatives were killed in traffic. But you also learned a lot about people whose only purpose in life is a car. Like with the Ku'damm speeders. The young men had no prospects, but they had a Mercedes AMG CLA 45 and an Audi A6 TDI. With that they raced through Berlin, shouting “We're fucking the streets and the shitty world we live in!” and filmed themselves. You saw a psychologist on the witness stand who does nothing other than examine speeders because there are so many. One thing unites them all, she said: overestimation of oneself, the feeling of invulnerability and the need to define oneself through a vehicle. In her assessments she heard sentences like: The car is more important to me than my girlfriend. Or: When I die, I want to be buried with my car.
The crash on the Ku'damm dealt with two criminal chambers of the Berlin regional court, the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Constitutional Court. Something had to be re-examined again and again, such as the question of whether a speeder really accepts the death of others. Whether a car is a dangerous weapon like a weapon. Whether every illegal street race is not an attempted murder and if so, where does one draw the line to uncontrolled driving? Almost seven years after the crime, it was clear in 2022: One of the two speeders had committed murder, the other an attempted murder. Last but not least, you could see how long and precisely the judiciary has to work to turn an obvious question (Are speeders murderers?) into a precedent.