German cannibal faces murder charge again at trial.
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who killed and ate a willing victim faces the prospect of a stiffer sentence at a retrial starting on Thursday for a crime that continues to horrify and enthral.
Armin Meiwes, 44, was convicted of manslaughter and given an 8-1/2-year jail term in January 2004 for cutting up a man he met via the Internet three years before.
However, Germany's Supreme Court ruled last April that the verdict was too lenient and Meiwes should face a second trial with a renewed murder charge.
Retrial chambers do not have to follow a higher court's decision, but are normally steered by their arguments. However, as prosecutors point out, this case is anything but normal.
Meiwes, a computer repairman, admitted killing Berlin-based computer specialist Bernd-Juergen Brandes, 42, but had initially been spared a murder conviction and a possible life sentence because the victim had asked to be eaten.
Prosecutors argued that Meiwes should have been found guilty of murder as he had killed to satisfy perverted desires.
Defense counsel Harald Ermel has argued that Meiwes's sole motive was to meet the wishes of his victim and that his crime was only "killing on request," a form of illegal euthanasia that carries a maximum five-year sentence.
Ermel declined to comment on the case before Thursday's trial, although he said on Monday he would seek to block the planned March screening of "Rotenburg," a film based on Meiwes's life and named after his home town in central Germany.
At his home there, in a "slaughter room" fitted out with butcher's bench, meat hook and cage, Meiwes severed Brandt's ***** and they both tried to eat it.
Later he killed Brandt, by then unconscious from blood loss, cut his body up and froze it, eating some 20 kg (44 lb) of it over the following months.
Psychiatrists found Meiwes deeply disturbed but sane.
What exactly leads someone down the road of life, to wake up one day and go "You know this '**** & Ball Torture Fetish' that I have isn't doing it for me anymore, I think I'd like to try some '***** Sashimi' instead."
"Just for shi[/i]ts and giggles."
Even further, how fu[/u]cked up in the head do you have to be, to willingly let some german guy you met over the internet in the "****&Ball Torture=Good Times Chat-Room", cut your "Wienerschnitzel" off and eat it together before you pass out from blood loss and die?