Anneli Auer attended a hearing at the District Court of Varsinais-Suomi in Turku in December 2017. Auer was seeking millions of euros in compensation for the time she served for the murder of her husband, a crime she was acquitted of in 2015. (Roni Lehti – Str / Lehtikuva)
- Next Article Nordea: Finns plan on spending an average of €560 on Christmas
THE SUPREME COURT of Finland (KKO) has countermanded the sex-crimes sentences handed down to Anneli Auer and Jens Kukka, reports YLE.
KKO on 5 December ruled that the sentences should be countermanded and the closely watched case remanded to the court of first instance on grounds that there are very weighty reasons for re-examining the culpability of the defendants.
The Turku Court of Appeal in 2013 found Auer and Kukka guilty of charges that include assault and aggravated child sexual abuse, sentencing the former to 7.5 years and the latter to 10 years in prison. Both have already served the sentences for the crimes allegedly committed against the four children of Auer.
The defendants challenged the ruling in early 2023, after the now-adult children told that they had lied about the alleged sex crimes on a recording by the former couple’s defence counsel, Markku Fredman. The children said they had been pressured by their foster parents to fabricate stories about crimes that had not taken place.
The oldest of the four children had been adamant throughout the process that no crimes had taken place.
The accounts were key pieces of evidence in the trial.
Helsingin Sanomat has reported that the children were placed into a foster family in 2009, when Auer was arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband, Jukka Lahti, in Ulvila in December 2006. The murder case made its way through the court system twice before she was ruled not guilty by the Vaasa Court of Appeal in 2015.
Auer’s case is looking increasingly like “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice” in recent history in Finland, Susanna Reinboth, a crime reporter at Helsingin Sanomat, estimated in her comment on 5 December. Mistakes, she wrote, were made at various points of the protracted legal process – by police, prosecutors and courts.
KKO drew attention to the role of experts in the sex-crimes trial. The prosecution brought out a considerable number of psychologists who had interviewed the children and assessed the reliability of the children’s accounts. The experts concluded that the accounts were so detailed and consistent that it was unlikely that the children could have fabricated them without getting caught in contradictions.
It appears that the assessment was wrong.
“The accounts were therefore created partly by the foster parents and partly by the children themselves, and the accounts had been rehearsed together before interviews with officials,” the ruling reads according to Helsingin Sanomat.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
- Next Article Nordea: Finns plan on spending an average of €560 on Christmas
Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
