Trial for Interference in Official Functions

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

This was the third time that the authorities instituted legal proceedings against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. At the first trial of Marx, Engels and Korff, held on February 7, 1849, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty (see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 304-22). At the second trial on May 29, 1849 the Public Prosecutor’s office and the police authorities failed to sentence Marx and other newspaper editors in their absence and only Korff, the former responsible manager, was sentenced to a one-month term of imprisonment and to pay one-seventh of the costs (see this volume, pp. 519-20), so the third time it was decided to put only Korff on trial. It was thought that, by condemning him, other leading editors of the newspaper would likewise he morally discredited, above all Marx as editor-in-chief. But the reactionaries miscalculated: Korff was acquitted.

On May 30 the former responsible manager of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Hermann Korff, stood again before the police court, accused of having interfered in official functions and having committed an act encroaching on these functions. In an item in the supplement to No. 297 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of May 13 of this year, Korff had invited people to come to a meeting of the 14th Company of the civic militia and to enter their name on a list. Judicial proceedings were started against Korff for making this call, and he was arrested.

In the public trial the State Public Prosecutor, Boiling, sought to justify the indictment and asked for the defendant to be sentenced to a two-year term of imprisonment.

The counsel for the defence, barrister Rath, drew attention to the fact that for some time past similar items concerning the civic militia had been appearing in the local newspapers without there having been any prosecution hitherto. The accusation against Korff, he said, is utterly and completely unfounded. The convoking of the 14th Company in a tavern is not an official function, at most it is an attempt to form a company, that is to say, an attempt at exercising an official function. But assuming that the convocation in question were an official function in the legal sense, only two possibilities were then conceivable: 1) the civic militia is still in existence—and this I maintain is the position in principle; in that case Korff was entided to convene it. The civic militia had merely been suspended in Cologne during the state of siege; with the lifting of the state of siege, all former laws and institutions came back into force; even if not in practice, but legally the civic militia was once more in existence. Or 2) the civic militia was no longer in existence, and this is the view of the authorities and the Public Prosecutor’s office; in that case there was no official function either, and in that case the accusation is complete and utter nonsense.

After the prosecution had replied briefly to the counsel for the defence, barrister Hagen opened his address for the defendant, seeking to demonstrate that the most that could be imputed to him was a remote intention to interfere in official functions, but not in any sense an actual act, actual interference, as is required by Art. 258 of the Penal Code. The court thereupon adjourned for about a quarter of an hour to its committee room and then acquitted the defendant with neither sentence nor costs.

Despite this acquittal, Korff was taken back into custody by order of the State Public Prosecutor, since he intends to appeal against the verdict of acquittal.