Legal ‘farce’ means Fritzl could be free in six years

THE sensational trial of Josef Fritzl could turn into a farce, it was warned today.

One Austrian legal expert believes Fritzl, 73, could be free in just six and-a-half years even if found guilty of most of his crimes at the trial, which the media is banned from attending.

Dr Raoul Wagner, an eminent Viennese lawyer,
warned that the charges have "little chance of working to keep Fritzl in jail for life".

The charges facing Fritzl include rape, incest, false imprisonment, slavery, coercion, deprivation of liberty and one of murder.

That relates to a baby born in the cellar in 1996. One of twins, Michael survived just three days. Fritzl picked up his body and burned it in the heating stove of the house.

Prosecutors say that by depriving the child of urgent medical care he was, in fact, its murderer.
Fritzl denies that charge but admits, in principle, most of the others.

Dr Wagner said: "I am convinced that after six-and-a-half years he will be free again. The murder charge has no chance as the body was allegedly burnt and the ashes scattered in the garden. There is no body and only Elisabeth's word over the details.

"The slavery charge has never been used since it was put on the books, and it does not really affect what happened here. He did not buy or sell his daughter in the slave trade and the charges do not apply.

"At the most the incest and rape charge apply, and as sentences run concurrently the most he would face would be rape — which means seven- and-a-half years with good behaviour, which with the year already spent inside means in six-and-a-half years he could be released. In a case like this the Austrian legal system is a nonsense. In America, for 3,000 rapes a person would face 30,000 years in jail."

The decision to ban the media and public from most of the trial is also risky, as it means there could be allegations that the trial was not properly conducted.

Constitutional expert Heinz Mayer warned: "If anyone were to raise an objection against the exclusion of the public then the whole proceedings might need to happen again."

Jurors will hear a tale of unparalleled horror endured by Elisabeth Fritzl: of 3,000 rapes, solitary childbirth in the darkness of a rat-infested cellar, beatings, humiliation and near-starvation.

She was 18 in 1984 when her sexually obsessed, convicted rapist father Josef, drugged her with ether and walled her up in the cellar he carved beneath the family home in Amstetten, Austria.

The court will hear how for the first six to nine months — Elisabeth is unsure because there was no way to measure time except in her head — she was kept chained to four poles with an iron girdle device around her middle. Fritzl only removed it because it interfered with his sex sessions.

Jurors have been promised psychiatric counselling if the evidence becomes too much to bear.

Elisabeth will tell via videoed testimony how her father began abusing her when she was just 11, leaving pornographic magazines in her room and masturbating in front of her. This was the precursor to the hell of the cellar where he would rape her, often in front of the children she bore him.

Other evidence will include the findings of psychiatrists about Fritzl's state of mind, the health of the six cellar children, testimony from the police and from buildings experts speaking about the cellar's construction.

Austrian bureaucracy will also have explain how a convicted sex offender got away with his crimes for so long. Social workers will have to answer why they entered the Fritzl home – a house of fear, by all accounts, where his family dreaded his presence – 21 times and were never suspicious about him.