The Acquittal - A great Unknown of the Criminal Justice System - An Empirical Study of the Practical Meaning of Acquittals after Pretrial Detention and its Causes -

正如我们在研究项目“无罪释放——刑事司法系统的未知”的首次提案中精心雕琢出来的那样？(项目号（KI 689/5-1），经验犯罪学的科学景观缺乏对无罪释放的频率和重要性的差异化分析。该研究小组旨在缩小这一差距。需要澄清的是，无罪释放更多的是一种不可避免的司法摩擦损失（Merbreier, 1970），还是刑事司法系统可避免的错误。对执法统计数据的分析在第一次提案中如期进行。相反，由于统计厅和检察机关的处理迟缓，法庭档案的分析工作被大大推迟。这些延误导致了对法院档案的调查直到2016年春天才结束的意外情况。由于法庭档案分析的结果将成为计划进行的专家面谈的基础，因此只有在研究小组完成了对大约300起审判前羁押的无罪释放案件的调查之后，才能进行专家面谈。因此，访谈是为了讨论结果并回答由此产生的开放性问题。因此，除了继续和巩固法庭档案分析之外，额外要求的供资期间的重点在于实现和评价专家面谈。现有的临时结果表明，该研究计划的继续将对研究作出重大贡献。

As we carved out elaborately in the first-time proposal of the research-program The Acquittal - an Unknown of the Criminal Justice System? (Project no. KI 689/5-1), the scientific landscape of empirical criminology lacks in a differentiating analysis of the frequency and the importance of the acquittal. The research-group aims at closing this gap. It is to be clarified if an acquittal is more of an inevitable frictional loss of justice (Merbreier, 1970), or an avoidable error of the criminal justice system. The analysis of the statistics of law enforcement was conducted as scheduled in the first-time proposal. By contrast, the analysis of court files was considerably postponed due to delayed handling on the part of the Statistical State Offices on the one hand and the public prosecutor´s offices on the other. These delays led to the unexpected circumstance that the investigation of the court files could not have been finished until spring 2016. As the results of the court file-analysis are to form the basis of the planned expert interviews, those can only be conducted if the research team completed the investigation of about 300 proceedings of acquittals with pre-trial custody. The interviews are hence to discuss the results and to answer open questions resulting from them. Besides the continuation and consolidation of the court-file-analysis, the focus of the additionally requested funding period therefore lies on the realization and evaluation of the expert interviews. The existing temporary results indicate that the continuation of the research-program let expect to contribute significantly to research.