Does the Meiwes case bode ill for S/M?

[elfs]

By all accounts, Marwin Meiwes and his breakfast, er, victim are probably well-known to non-US readers. Although the Meiwes case has been downplayed in the US, the actual case is somewhat spectacular. Miewes advertised on the Internet his "search for a young man 18-30 for slaughtering." Bernd Brandes showed up on Meiwes door and offered himself up. There's absolutely no doubt that Brandes and Meiwes were very serious about their agreement: Meiwes would kill and eat Brandes.

German prosecutors want to charge Meiwes with murder. But they can't. Brandes clearly and without apparent duress repeatedly stated his desired to be killed and eaten. Under German law, the most they can charge him with is "unauthorized consensual euthanasia," which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. The same is true of cannibalism; the most prosecutors can come up with is "disturbing the peace of the dead," which is not a felony.

A lawyer at the U.N., Noah Leavitt, has proposed a different tack: charge Meiwes with torture. As Leavitt notes:

These international and European law sources appropriately recognize that, when the crime is torture, the victim's consent is almost completely irrelevant. As has been exhaustibly documented in studies from around the world, torture victims will "consent" to almost anything if faced with enough pain. As a result, a victim's consent to torture can never be trusted.

This represents a chilling new possibility for prosecutors who want to appear moral and "doing something": since consent is never a defense in cases of torture, if a prosecutor can convince a judge that S/M constitutes torture, S/M will become de-facto illegal in that district. And it only takes a few precedents to make such an assumption the law of the land.

Comments

[rapier.livejournal.com]

Lordy mama. You know what this would mean, right? S&M'ers and others who like it a little rough will need to file notarized affidavits asserting consent and get powers of attorney before every fling, romp, session, whathaveyou. Hooray for paperwork! I wonder what such forms would look like?

:-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/dominic-m-/]

maybe they would have little leather clad smiley faces whipping one another on the top.hmm come to think of it that might be fun to have as a smiley online....