GIn the end, Mark S. got emotional again. After the closing arguments in the doping trial in Munich, the doctor apologized to his co-defendants and his family and expressed a wish: After the end of the proceedings and his prison sentence, he would like to return to the regular practice in Erfurt. “I hope that I can come back sometime,” said the medic. The criminal chamber of the Munich II regional court will decide on next Friday with its verdict on whether that will work.
A caring doctor and system victim or a negligent doper and unscrupulous manipulator: on the penultimate day of the hearing, the 42-year-old was once again characterized completely differently in the closing arguments. The public prosecutor sees Erfurt as a long-time doping organizer who wanted to earn money with the fraud, “completely thrown in his professional oath” and is sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment for dangerous bodily harm.
The doctor’s lawyers, on the other hand, want their client free soon, preferably right after the verdict is announced next Friday. The defense lawyers demanded that the arrest warrant be suspended. Only the prosecution and defense agreed on Friday that Mark S. had been doing blood doping on several winter and cycling athletes for years and that in the last years of his actions up to the raid of “Operation Aderlass” in February 2019, four helpers were involved.
Ratings diverge
Mark S. asserted several times in the proceedings that, as a sports fan and doctor, he had always been interested in treating athletes with high medical standards and the greatest possible care. Chief Public Prosecutor Kai Gräber doubted this in his closing lecture and recalled, among other things, blood transfusions, sometimes in the dark of a back seat under the faint glow of a mobile phone light.
On Friday, the ratings differed widely, especially about an episode from autumn 2017: Mark S. had injected an Austrian mountain biker with a preparation that later turned out to be a research chemical. Prosecutor Gräber spoke of a “human experiment”, he wants a conviction for dangerous bodily harm and a five-year professional ban against the doctor.
Mark S.’s defense lawyers believe that their client should not be punished in the case. They argued that the doctor accidentally injected the wrong product, so negligent bodily harm was a possibility. Because the mountain biker did not report him because of this, he was acquitted on the point.
Mark S. is hoping for a mitigation of the sentence, for example because he has been cooperative with the investigators since the arrest, because he showed remorse in the course of the proceedings, because he recently released a special refrigerator for the corona vaccination and because he has already been massively prejudiced in public be. In addition, he made it clear that the other four defendants were not equal accomplices but only helpers, said his lawyers.
In addition to such specific information, defender Yuri Goldstein was also fundamentally asserted, for example, that doping is an integral part of top-class sport. “Everything is just speculative, everything is smoke and mirrors!” Replied public prosecutor Gräber energetically. “Where are the names? Where are the doctors I only heard speculation and speculation here, not a single name was on the table. “
The public prosecutor applied for a sentence of two and a half years for the co-defendant Dirk Q. – but Q. did not have to return to prison due to the almost two-year pre-trial detention that had already been served. The defense lawyers pleaded for a maximum of two years in prison. The public prosecutor’s office requested suspended sentences for the other accomplices: two years with the nurse Diana S., one and a half years with the paramedic Sven M. and one year with Ansgard S., the father of the physician accused.
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