Caspar Leinen—Fabrizio Collini: defense counsel and defendant

Caspar Leinen’s relationship with Fabrizio Collini is both professional and deeply conflicted: appointed to defend a man who admits killing Hans Meyer, Leinen must work through his own friendship with the Meyer family while trying to understand the motive Collini will not initially explain. Their attorney-client relationship develops from a formal assignment into a defense built on Collini’s account, historical records, and Leinen’s insistence that the court consider the history behind the killing.

Appointment and divided loyalties

Leinen applies to be appointed as Collini’s court-appointed defense counsel during the proceedings over Collini’s detention. The prosecutor’s office raises no objection. The assignment places Leinen in a difficult position: he is not approaching an unfamiliar case without personal connections, but defending a man accused of killing Hans Meyer, a friend of the Meyer family with whom Leinen himself has a history.

At their first meeting, Leinen tells Collini about that friendship and asks whether it is a problem. Collini says it is not. His response does not resolve the conflict for Leinen, but it establishes that Collini will not ask him to withdraw on that ground. For Leinen, the encounter makes the professional obligation immediate: the case concerns someone he has represented in his memories as a friend, while Collini is now his client and the person accused of killing him.

Confession without an explanation

When Leinen tells Collini that he may face a life sentence, Collini acknowledges that he committed the killing. He does not initially explain why. Leinen is therefore left with an admission that establishes Collini’s responsibility for the act but does not answer the question that will shape their work together: what led him to do it?

Leinen’s reaction is divided between the demands of defense counsel and the personal force of the case. He struggles to face Collini and to continue asking questions, but he does so. The distinction between what Collini admits and what remains unexplained becomes central to their relationship. Leinen can take the confession into account as a fact, yet cannot treat it as a complete account of the crime or its meaning.

That evening, Leinen tells Johanna Meyer that he has persuaded Collini to confess to the killing, but that this is all he has been able to obtain from his client. Johanna’s distress makes the unanswered question personal as well as professional. Leinen nevertheless decides he has no alternative but to continue the defense. His decision does not mean that he has resolved his divided loyalties; it means that he accepts the work required by his role even while the reason for the killing remains unknown to him.

Research and the changing defense

During the trial’s adjournment, Leinen works through files in the reading room, ordering photocopies and filling notebooks with notes. The research is physically taxing: he works into the evenings without taking breaks, and by the time he returns to Berlin he has lost two kilos. After bringing boxes of copies to his chambers, he visits Collini in remand prison. Their meeting lasts seven hours. When Leinen leaves, he knows what he must do next.

The records become more than background material for the defense. Leinen later tells the court that he is presenting what he heard from Collini alongside what he found in the files in Ludwigsburg. His approach does not dispute the admitted killing; it gives the court a wider account in which to consider it. The work alters the terms of his relationship with Collini: Leinen is no longer asking only for an explanation in conversation, but assembling and presenting evidence that may help make the act intelligible to the court.

Advocacy and a concealed connection

In his first major plea, Leinen reads slowly from a prepared statement, drawing on Collini’s account and the Ludwigsburg files. His legal language is restrained, but the material changes how the courtroom receives the case. As the account unfolds, Leinen himself recognizes that criminal proceedings concern abused human beings, not only the interpretation of legal rules. The moment marks a change in his understanding of the defense: the records and the client’s history must be heard as human experience as well as case material.

Later, during Dr Schwan’s testimony, Leinen asks who had brought charges against Hans Meyer. The answer is Collini. The revelation is new to the courtroom; a judge reacts with surprise, and Richard Mattinger’s expression changes. It supplies a concrete link between Collini and Meyer that had not been known to those present, while making the history of the case relevant to the question of motive.

When Mattinger objects to questions about the legal treatment of Nazi crimes, Leinen argues that the history matters because it bears on whether Collini’s act was arbitrary or understandable. The presiding judge permits the inquiry on the ground that motive may influence the question of guilt. Leinen then asks Dr Schwan about the 1968 limitation decision and, later, the identity of Dr Eduard Dreher, whose name was associated with a widely used legal commentary. These exchanges show Leinen using historical and legal material as part of his defense of Collini, rather than treating the case as exhausted by the confession.

The relationship’s significance

The available episodes do not resolve the case’s final outcome, and Collini’s early admission does not, by itself, explain his motive. What they establish is the shape of Leinen’s commitment: he continues as counsel despite his connection to the Meyer family, listens to what Collini will say, researches beyond the initial account, and brings the client’s previously unknown complaint against Meyer into the courtroom.

Their relationship is defined by the gap between acknowledgment and explanation. Collini accepts responsibility for the killing but initially leaves Leinen without its cause; Leinen responds not by denying the admission, but by seeking the history that could place it in context. The defense thus becomes a contest over what the killing means as well as who committed it, and Leinen’s work turns his professional duty into an effort to make the client’s fuller story available to the court.