7 ms·

German murderer wins 'right to be forgotten'

vixen99 7y ago
An Orwellian rectification that seems to be catching on. "rectify — the Ministry of Truth euphemism for the alteration of the historical record:"
- asjw 7y ago
  That's not what's happening here. In 1984 the facts were changed, the chocolate ration is the most famous example of this. This is just the right after 30 years of jail having paid the debt to society to have a second chance. The official records and newspapers of the past 30 years report the fact as it happened, nobody altered them
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I don't know the details of this case, but, the guy was caught and served his time. He has been punished for what he did, and hopefully he's been rehabilitated and can reintegrate back into society. That's a lot more difficult if any employer (for example) googles his name and decides to not hire him because he did something thirty years ago. He's asking for a change in search results, that won't erase what he did and / or his conviction.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    It's like the joke: but do they call me "McGregor the bridge builder"? No! Point is in life there are things you can't walk back.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
I find interesting that while the "right to be forgotten" does not prevent the person from being named, all the articles I have found on Google are careful not to name him (and I'm not talking about German articles, but articles in English from non-German sources). This strikes me as self-censorship. As an aside, it's also interesting that a person sentenced to life for murdering two people in 1982 was freed in 2002...
- kstenerud 7y ago
  "Life" in Germany typically means between 15 and 25 years (and there's no such thing as stacking life sentences). Nobody is ever kept permanently incarcerated except for very very very extreme circumstances where they are considered still dangerous, and must be kept in a separate facility that's technically not a prison sentence. The goal of the justice system in Germany is reform, not retribution. The "self-censorship" is done out of respect for the spirit of the law.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    Your comment is basically correct, let me add a little correction: You're talking about "Sicherungsverwahrung", which has indeed that effect, but a regular life sentence without Sicherungsverwahrung can also be indefinitely long, until the person dies. There are also perodical checks whether the prisoner is still a danger to society or whether he can be released, but it is possible to stay in regular prison without Sicherungsverwahrung forever.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    > The "self-censorship" is done out of respect for the spirit of the law. Or fear of being dropped by the search engines?
    - Kbelicius 7y ago
      The article would be dropped from the search engines, not the publishers...
- bloak 7y ago
  What if he has a really common name? What if he has a rare name that happens to be shared with one other person? I don't think naming people online is a good idea any more.
- aliceryhl 7y ago
  A life sentence is rarely truly a life sentence in western countries.
1e10 7y ago
Well let’s put the mans name here and references so that we don’t forget...
- monroviamonkey 7y ago
  [redacted]
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>...when he shot and killed two people and severely injured another during a row. My two cents: maybe the memory should be longer for a few things, stealing a loaf of bread or smoking pot is quite different from murders. In many countries cold blooded murders give you a life sentence or death (either by the state--or victim's family members when the state does not act) so maybe this guy should have had the chance to file such an appeal.
- precisioncoder 7y ago
  From the sounds of this it wasn't actually murder, it was manslaughter. Murder requires being premeditated where this sounds like it was heat of the moment. Personally I think we should either rehibilitate and then forget in order to give them a chance to contribute to society, or keep them in prison. The idea of releasing people but then villifying them will basically just channel them back into the criminal system again. Studies have shown the best way to prevent crime is with reintegrating them socially. The biggest risk factors are: "prior criminal history, lifestyle instability (unemployment, frequent moves), and negative peer associations" The right to be forgotten would reduce two out of three of those risks. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/smrsk-fctrs/index-en.aspx https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/smrsk-fctrs...
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Wouldn't that make it second degree murder in US context?
    - precisioncoder 7y ago
      It could be either depends a lot on the context that led to the altercation. "Voluntary manslaughter Sometimes called a crime of passion murder, is any intentional killing that involves no prior intent to kill, and which was committed under such circumstances that would "cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed". Both this and second-degree murder are committed on the spot under a spur-of-the-moment choice, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the crime. For example, a bar fight that results in death would ordinarily constitute second-degree murder. If that same bar fight stemmed from a discovery of infidelity, however, it may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter."
ga-vu 7y ago
Was there even an internet for someone to chronolog his murders back in 1982? I don't get this article at all...
- Tomte 7y ago
  Newspapers have been digitizing their back archives.
tom_mellior 7y ago
Court ruling (in German, unsurprisingly): https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/DE/2019/11/rs20191106_1bvr001613.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid... Interestingly, the ruling refers to the yacht as "A.", unlike the BBC article which uses the full name.
- bildung 7y ago
  Because the BBC does not fall under German juristication.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    That's not the point. The BBC was not forced to redact the name, yes. This still left the BBC free to redact it, or not hint at the name at all (like the Guardian). The BBC seems to have made a conscious decision to make the case easier to Google. They didn't need to do that.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      In the UK people in criminal cases are always fully named (except minors). In fact, at least in local news it is customary to publish name and residence location (to avoid confusion). E.g. a newspaper article would say that "John Doe of Dodgy Street, London has been sentenced today at the Old Bailey to 10 years for drug trafficking", often with the police mugshot as illustration. My local news site runs an article every month with these details for all the people sentenced locally during the past month.
      - tom_mellior 7y ago
        > In the UK people in criminal cases are always fully named (except minors). If that were some sort of important guiding principle of all of the UK press in general, you'd think that the BBC would have dug up the person's name in this case. I don't have much data to go on, but I thought that the BBC might apply different standards than tabloids or the local news.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Well that's disappointing. I've generally been in favour of right to be forgotten as in a UK context it aligns well with the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. A minor offence would be legally forgotten quickly, a murder would carry a sentence of over 4 years which would never be eligible for forgetting. It seems odd to me to clear something quite so serious.
curt15 7y ago
So does "right to be forgotten" mean that people don't have a right to remember?
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  No, and the actual law is also not called that way.
- nabla9 7y ago
  You are asking seemingly rhetorical and sarcastic question based on overly literal understanding of the 'right to be forgotten'.
- jeremyfranco 7y ago
  does my right to die the way I want means that people don't have a right to live?
Grumbledour 7y ago
What always baffles me about the right to be forgotten is that the issue never is if something should truly be forgotten - it should not, it will stay on record, in news articles etc. - but always if the offending piece of information should be removed from search engine indexes. I find this really troubling, because just making it harder to find does not remove it and shifts power to persons who can make better use of search/indexing tools or have the means to hire someone who does.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  It's a reasonable, but imperfect analogue for the old obscurity by sheer quantity. If you are a regular employee seeking a new job, it shields from idle searches turfing up minor offences from years or decades ago. Europe seems to embrace the possibility of rehabilitation, and I think it's fair that shoplifting or a suspended sentence eventually goes away. In this context, plenty of roles would be exempt from the expiry, e.g. joining the police, or working in the legal system, among many others. Neither case will prevent some major politician, business leader or celeb being investigated if they come under enough of a cloud. Lack of search just makes it a little less trivial. If your journalist really thinks there is history to be found you send an intern or three to trawl through 30 years of press archives at the local reference library. How it used to be done. To me, that seems a reasonable balance and sensibly protective of the general population being discriminated against for having done something minor and daft 25 years ago.
  - LeanderK 7y ago
    I agree. I does not remove the information, it just makes it harder to find. If google in the future truly lives up to it's ideal and gives me exactly the information I was looking for, then removing the information from the index would enable one to rehabilitate and not be discriminated against afterwards.
  - Grumbledour 7y ago
    It just seems like a sloppy solution to do this at search engine level, especially when most of these search engines are outside of european jurisdiction. I think it would be much more sensible to require the actual sources to anonymize their online content after a certain time or just whenever something like this goes to court instead of having private companies keep registers of "forbidden" links.
jonathanstrange 7y ago
I'm a bit torn in this case. I'm generally for the right to be forgotten, especially in cases like this one, after the criminal has served a lifetime in prison and has been re-integrated into society. However, the decision has some strange aspects to it and elicits the usual ignorance about the Internet. From what I've read, the judges primarily bemoaned that it is so easy to search for his case by his name. Instead, the German magazine Der Spiegel is supposed to kind of obfuscate the original articles in their online archive, making discovery harder, but not necessarily to delete them or alter his name in them. The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' - and in a case like this, the stories are all over the net anyway.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  >lifetime I'm not sure if we have the same definition of that word. Maybe it is one of those marketing-speak lifetimes?
  - jonathanstrange 7y ago
    For your information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany
- jakub_g 7y ago
  There's a meta-tag to prevent indexing a page (assuming the bots are good and follow it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex The question is whether the court would be happy with just this. Does the verdict say it's up to Der Spiegel to get this unsearchable, or up to some search engines like Google to remove it from their indexes? BTW: TIL that Yandex also supports <noindex> HTML tag: <noindex>Don't index this text.</noindex>
- Kbelicius 7y ago
  > The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' In the case of the "right to be forgotten" no kind of obfuscation is needed from the publisher. Article stays where it is in its originality the only thing that happens is that article is no longer shown in search results of search engines when searching the mans name. If you search for the name of the victim those articles still might show as search results.
monroviamonkey 7y ago
Link to original article: http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/14355425 http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/14355425
Tomte 7y ago
I find these discussions pretty boring, because virtually none of the commenters have ever even read the two or three short articles of our Grundgesetz that are at the center of this legal question. I'm not talking about familiarizing yourself with standard legal doctrine or landmark constitutional court rulings. Just having a little respect for the fact that the US Constitution does not apply. The right to be forgotten is not decided on a whim by a few judges, according to their personal preferences, there is legal text surrounding the issue. We Europeans who criticize your Second Amendment may be shallow, as well, but we have usually at least read something about a "well-regulated militia" or the "right to keep and bear arms", so we understand where you're coming from, even if we think that's nuts.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but... > none of the commenters have ever even read the two or three short articles of our Grundgesetz ... referring to "two or three" specific articles without providing a link, or at least the numbers so we can look them up, is not as useful as it could be.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bildung 7y ago
    It's a simple text that fits on a single web page. Put the word into the search engine of your choice and off you go. Honestly, if one a) isn't capable of grasping the idea that different countries have different foundational laws, and b) isn't capable to find the relevant passages of the Grundgesetz without external help, one should really double check whether commenting on the case at hand is a net plus for the community.
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
      I know where to find the Grundgesetz, thank you. > relevant passages That's the place in your post where a link (or article number) would have been useful.
Nitramp 7y ago
> [...] violated his rights and his "ability to develop his personality," That's a rather poor translation of "Recht zur freien Persönlichkeitsentfaltung". It's not really about developing your personality, it's the right to live freely and pursue your personal life goals; something more akin to "the pursuit of happiness".
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  >>it's the right to live freely and pursue your personal life goals; something more akin to "the pursuit of happiness". I bet that the people already rotted due to his bullets will ask the court for the same rights.
  - Nitramp 7y ago
    He's served his term of 20 years. He has the same human rights as you or I do.

An Orwellian rectification that seems to be catching on. "rectify — the Ministry of Truth euphemism for the alteration of the historical record:"

asjw 7y ago
That's not what's happening here. In 1984 the facts were changed, the chocolate ration is the most famous example of this. This is just the right after 30 years of jail having paid the debt to society to have a second chance. The official records and newspapers of the past 30 years report the fact as it happened, nobody altered them
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I don't know the details of this case, but, the guy was caught and served his time. He has been punished for what he did, and hopefully he's been rehabilitated and can reintegrate back into society. That's a lot more difficult if any employer (for example) googles his name and decides to not hire him because he did something thirty years ago. He's asking for a change in search results, that won't erase what he did and / or his conviction.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  It's like the joke: but do they call me "McGregor the bridge builder"? No! Point is in life there are things you can't walk back.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

I find interesting that while the "right to be forgotten" does not prevent the person from being named, all the articles I have found on Google are careful not to name him (and I'm not talking about German articles, but articles in English from non-German sources). This strikes me as self-censorship. As an aside, it's also interesting that a person sentenced to life for murdering two people in 1982 was freed in 2002...

kstenerud 7y ago
"Life" in Germany typically means between 15 and 25 years (and there's no such thing as stacking life sentences). Nobody is ever kept permanently incarcerated except for very very very extreme circumstances where they are considered still dangerous, and must be kept in a separate facility that's technically not a prison sentence. The goal of the justice system in Germany is reform, not retribution. The "self-censorship" is done out of respect for the spirit of the law.
- Tomte 7y ago
  Your comment is basically correct, let me add a little correction: You're talking about "Sicherungsverwahrung", which has indeed that effect, but a regular life sentence without Sicherungsverwahrung can also be indefinitely long, until the person dies. There are also perodical checks whether the prisoner is still a danger to society or whether he can be released, but it is possible to stay in regular prison without Sicherungsverwahrung forever.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  > The "self-censorship" is done out of respect for the spirit of the law. Or fear of being dropped by the search engines?
  - Kbelicius 7y ago
    The article would be dropped from the search engines, not the publishers...
bloak 7y ago
What if he has a really common name? What if he has a rare name that happens to be shared with one other person? I don't think naming people online is a good idea any more.
aliceryhl 7y ago
A life sentence is rarely truly a life sentence in western countries.

1e10 7y ago

Well let’s put the mans name here and references so that we don’t forget...

monroviamonkey 7y ago
[redacted]

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>...when he shot and killed two people and severely injured another during a row. My two cents: maybe the memory should be longer for a few things, stealing a loaf of bread or smoking pot is quite different from murders. In many countries cold blooded murders give you a life sentence or death (either by the state--or victim's family members when the state does not act) so maybe this guy should have had the chance to file such an appeal.

precisioncoder 7y ago
From the sounds of this it wasn't actually murder, it was manslaughter. Murder requires being premeditated where this sounds like it was heat of the moment. Personally I think we should either rehibilitate and then forget in order to give them a chance to contribute to society, or keep them in prison. The idea of releasing people but then villifying them will basically just channel them back into the criminal system again. Studies have shown the best way to prevent crime is with reintegrating them socially. The biggest risk factors are: "prior criminal history, lifestyle instability (unemployment, frequent moves), and negative peer associations" The right to be forgotten would reduce two out of three of those risks. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/smrsk-fctrs/index-en.aspx https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/smrsk-fctrs...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Wouldn't that make it second degree murder in US context?
  - precisioncoder 7y ago
    It could be either depends a lot on the context that led to the altercation. "Voluntary manslaughter Sometimes called a crime of passion murder, is any intentional killing that involves no prior intent to kill, and which was committed under such circumstances that would "cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed". Both this and second-degree murder are committed on the spot under a spur-of-the-moment choice, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the crime. For example, a bar fight that results in death would ordinarily constitute second-degree murder. If that same bar fight stemmed from a discovery of infidelity, however, it may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter."

ga-vu 7y ago

Was there even an internet for someone to chronolog his murders back in 1982? I don't get this article at all...

Tomte 7y ago
Newspapers have been digitizing their back archives.

tom_mellior 7y ago

Court ruling (in German, unsurprisingly): https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/DE/2019/11/rs20191106_1bvr001613.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid... Interestingly, the ruling refers to the yacht as "A.", unlike the BBC article which uses the full name.

bildung 7y ago
Because the BBC does not fall under German juristication.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  That's not the point. The BBC was not forced to redact the name, yes. This still left the BBC free to redact it, or not hint at the name at all (like the Guardian). The BBC seems to have made a conscious decision to make the case easier to Google. They didn't need to do that.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    In the UK people in criminal cases are always fully named (except minors). In fact, at least in local news it is customary to publish name and residence location (to avoid confusion). E.g. a newspaper article would say that "John Doe of Dodgy Street, London has been sentenced today at the Old Bailey to 10 years for drug trafficking", often with the police mugshot as illustration. My local news site runs an article every month with these details for all the people sentenced locally during the past month.
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
      > In the UK people in criminal cases are always fully named (except minors). If that were some sort of important guiding principle of all of the UK press in general, you'd think that the BBC would have dug up the person's name in this case. I don't have much data to go on, but I thought that the BBC might apply different standards than tabloids or the local news.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Well that's disappointing. I've generally been in favour of right to be forgotten as in a UK context it aligns well with the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. A minor offence would be legally forgotten quickly, a murder would carry a sentence of over 4 years which would never be eligible for forgetting. It seems odd to me to clear something quite so serious.

curt15 7y ago

So does "right to be forgotten" mean that people don't have a right to remember?

jonathanstrange 7y ago
No, and the actual law is also not called that way.
nabla9 7y ago
You are asking seemingly rhetorical and sarcastic question based on overly literal understanding of the 'right to be forgotten'.
jeremyfranco 7y ago
does my right to die the way I want means that people don't have a right to live?

Grumbledour 7y ago

What always baffles me about the right to be forgotten is that the issue never is if something should truly be forgotten - it should not, it will stay on record, in news articles etc. - but always if the offending piece of information should be removed from search engine indexes. I find this really troubling, because just making it harder to find does not remove it and shifts power to persons who can make better use of search/indexing tools or have the means to hire someone who does.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
It's a reasonable, but imperfect analogue for the old obscurity by sheer quantity. If you are a regular employee seeking a new job, it shields from idle searches turfing up minor offences from years or decades ago. Europe seems to embrace the possibility of rehabilitation, and I think it's fair that shoplifting or a suspended sentence eventually goes away. In this context, plenty of roles would be exempt from the expiry, e.g. joining the police, or working in the legal system, among many others. Neither case will prevent some major politician, business leader or celeb being investigated if they come under enough of a cloud. Lack of search just makes it a little less trivial. If your journalist really thinks there is history to be found you send an intern or three to trawl through 30 years of press archives at the local reference library. How it used to be done. To me, that seems a reasonable balance and sensibly protective of the general population being discriminated against for having done something minor and daft 25 years ago.
- LeanderK 7y ago
  I agree. I does not remove the information, it just makes it harder to find. If google in the future truly lives up to it's ideal and gives me exactly the information I was looking for, then removing the information from the index would enable one to rehabilitate and not be discriminated against afterwards.
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  It just seems like a sloppy solution to do this at search engine level, especially when most of these search engines are outside of european jurisdiction. I think it would be much more sensible to require the actual sources to anonymize their online content after a certain time or just whenever something like this goes to court instead of having private companies keep registers of "forbidden" links.

jonathanstrange 7y ago

I'm a bit torn in this case. I'm generally for the right to be forgotten, especially in cases like this one, after the criminal has served a lifetime in prison and has been re-integrated into society. However, the decision has some strange aspects to it and elicits the usual ignorance about the Internet. From what I've read, the judges primarily bemoaned that it is so easy to search for his case by his name. Instead, the German magazine Der Spiegel is supposed to kind of obfuscate the original articles in their online archive, making discovery harder, but not necessarily to delete them or alter his name in them. The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' - and in a case like this, the stories are all over the net anyway.

NullPrefix 7y ago
>lifetime I'm not sure if we have the same definition of that word. Maybe it is one of those marketing-speak lifetimes?
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  For your information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany
jakub_g 7y ago
There's a meta-tag to prevent indexing a page (assuming the bots are good and follow it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex The question is whether the court would be happy with just this. Does the verdict say it's up to Der Spiegel to get this unsearchable, or up to some search engines like Google to remove it from their indexes? BTW: TIL that Yandex also supports <noindex> HTML tag: <noindex>Don't index this text.</noindex>
Kbelicius 7y ago
> The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' In the case of the "right to be forgotten" no kind of obfuscation is needed from the publisher. Article stays where it is in its originality the only thing that happens is that article is no longer shown in search results of search engines when searching the mans name. If you search for the name of the victim those articles still might show as search results.

monroviamonkey 7y ago

Link to original article: http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/14355425 http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/14355425

Tomte 7y ago

I find these discussions pretty boring, because virtually none of the commenters have ever even read the two or three short articles of our Grundgesetz that are at the center of this legal question. I'm not talking about familiarizing yourself with standard legal doctrine or landmark constitutional court rulings. Just having a little respect for the fact that the US Constitution does not apply. The right to be forgotten is not decided on a whim by a few judges, according to their personal preferences, there is legal text surrounding the issue. We Europeans who criticize your Second Amendment may be shallow, as well, but we have usually at least read something about a "well-regulated militia" or the "right to keep and bear arms", so we understand where you're coming from, even if we think that's nuts.

tom_mellior 7y ago
Not disagreeing with you, but... > none of the commenters have ever even read the two or three short articles of our Grundgesetz ... referring to "two or three" specific articles without providing a link, or at least the numbers so we can look them up, is not as useful as it could be.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bildung 7y ago
  It's a simple text that fits on a single web page. Put the word into the search engine of your choice and off you go. Honestly, if one a) isn't capable of grasping the idea that different countries have different foundational laws, and b) isn't capable to find the relevant passages of the Grundgesetz without external help, one should really double check whether commenting on the case at hand is a net plus for the community.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    I know where to find the Grundgesetz, thank you. > relevant passages That's the place in your post where a link (or article number) would have been useful.

Nitramp 7y ago

> [...] violated his rights and his "ability to develop his personality," That's a rather poor translation of "Recht zur freien Persönlichkeitsentfaltung". It's not really about developing your personality, it's the right to live freely and pursue your personal life goals; something more akin to "the pursuit of happiness".

onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>it's the right to live freely and pursue your personal life goals; something more akin to "the pursuit of happiness". I bet that the people already rotted due to his bullets will ask the court for the same rights.
- Nitramp 7y ago
  He's served his term of 20 years. He has the same human rights as you or I do.