Gustl Mollath

Who is Gustl Mollath?

Gustl Ferdinand Mollath is a German man who was acquitted during a criminal trial in 2006 on the basis of diminished criminal responsibility; he was committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital as the court deemed him a danger to the public and declared him insane based on expert diagnoses of paranoid personality disorder. Mollath's forensic incarceration for seven years and the surrounding legal judgments became the basis of a public controversy in Bavaria and the whole of Germany.

In 2006 after being accused of fabricating a story of money-laundering activities at a major bank and assaulting his former wife Petra Mollath, Gustl Mollath was tried at the District Court Nuernberg-Fuerth for aggravated assault and wrongful deprivation of personal liberty of his ex-wife as well as damage to property. The court justified its decision to declared Mollath criminally insane amongst other things, by citing a paranoid belief system Mollath had developed, which shows up partly in the belief that his former ex-wife is involved in a complex system of tax evasion.

In 2012, the case was widely publicized when evidence brought to the attention of state prosecutors showed that money-laundering activities were indeed practiced over several years by members of staff at the Munich-based HypoVereinsbank, as detailed in an internal audit report carried out by the bank in 2003 had revealed. On August 6, 2013, the Higher Regional Court of Nuremberg ordered a retrial and Mollath's immediate release, overturning a verdict of the Regional Court of Regensburg that had blocked a retrial.