A historic process has come to an end. On Friday, the Munich district court sentenced the doctor Mark Schmidt to four years and ten months imprisonment for doping and dangerous bodily harm. His four co-defendants were sentenced partly to fines and partly to prison terms of up to two years and four months. The court was partly based on the anti-doping law passed in 2015. In the case of crimes from previous years, the Medicines Act was still used. Judge Marion Tischler thus moved between the demands of the public prosecutor and the defense. The prosecutors had called for Schmidt to be imprisoned for five and a half years, the defense pleaded for a maximum of three years. The defendant accepted the verdict with an unmoved face.
Harder than the detention itself – Schmidt has already served almost two years in pre-trial detention – the three-year professional ban is likely to affect him. The judge justified this with the “danger that similar violations of the law could happen”. On the one hand, Tischler emphasized that she did not see Schmidt as the “great doper over the decades”. The judge, however, was bothered by the ruthlessness with which Schmidt had sometimes acted. A welding machine for blood bags from a transfusion clinic in Ljubljana was confiscated from him. Schmidt had received the device from a medical technician from the Slovenian capital in exchange for his own defective device: Schmidt consciously accepted that patients who were dependent on blood reserves in the Ljubljana hospital would have a disadvantage, according to the judge .
The professional ban imposed on Mark Schmidt is the clearest signal of this judgment. All doctors who dope athletes now run the risk of losing their mostly well-paid main job, at least temporarily, if they are caught.
Another clear signal is that Tischler expressly described the anti-doping law as such as being in conformity with the constitution. The defense had argued that there was no such thing as an integrity worth protecting in sport. “Everyone is doping,” emphasized Schmidt’s lawyer Juri Goldstein several times. The judge – trained in drug-related proceedings – made a distinction between light and dark fields. Anyone who acts in the dark is of course surrounded by criminal activity. But it suppresses the bright field, i.e. all the people who don’t deal, press and steal to raise money. Derived from doping in sport, athletes will be asked in the future: Do you belong to the light field or the dark field?
It was also legally significant that, despite numerous crime scenes abroad, Tischler considered the German criminal law to be decisive in determining the scope of punishment. So the criminal law at the scene of the crime does not apply. Only in a second step, when determining the amount of the penalty, does it take into account the law applicable at the scene of the crime. Crime scenes were among others in Austria and Italy, Switzerland and Slovenia, in the USA and South Korea. Sometimes there is no anti-doping law there. Tischler’s approach of starting from the German criminal law led to significantly higher penalties compared to the demands of the defense.
This concludes the German line of negotiations for the “bloodletting” process. In Switzerland, the professional cyclist Pirmin Lang has been sentenced to a fine, his professional colleagues Georg Preidler and Stefan Denifl to prison terms of one and two years. Cross-country skier Johannes Dürr has also been sentenced to 15 months probation. His statements in the ARD documentary “Greed for Gold” initiated the process in the first place. Many of the other 23 athletes who belong to Schmidt’s doping network do not have to answer in court. For some, such as the former professional cyclist Danilo Hondo, the deeds are statute-barred. In Slovenia, Croatia, Kazakhstan or Estonia – all of Schmidt’s customers’ countries of origin – there is no doping offense at all.
Public prosecutor Kai Gräber welcomed the verdict to “nd” and described it as an “important step in the anti-doping fight”. Schmidt’s defense attorneys hurriedly left the courthouse without talking to journalists. You now have a week to submit a revision request. Schmidt himself was taken back to the detention center. The refrigerator in which he kept the blood bags is now in Berlin and is used to store corona vaccines. A nice side effect of this process.
Tischler, who as a doping laywoman had thrown herself into the new field of activity with verve, even came up with advice on combating doping at the end. Based on the testimony of a helper Schmidt, who was shocked after the 2018 Winter Olympics about the puncture-holed elbows of many athletes, the judge said: »With junkies you always look in the crook of your arm. Why don’t you do that in sports? ”Yes, why is there no reaction to such obvious signs of syringe culture?
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