WILLING TO RISK LIFE

Dunstan Times, 13 March 1933, Page 3

WILLING TO RISK LIFE

DRAMATIC CHALLENGE OFFER TO DRINK POISON. Has there ever before been a lawyer so supremely confident in the innocence of his client —a man sentenced to death for murder by poisoning—that he was willing to risk his life to prove his client's innocence. Such a lawyer has been found in Cologne. Dr Hermann Mannheimer has offered to take a dose of poison identical with that administered by his client, Dr Richter, a Bingen physician, to a hospital nurse named Mertens, who was alleged to have died in consequence of the administration of the poison. Dr Ritcher was sentenced to death in 1929 on conviction on a charge of murder by poisoning, but, later, the sentence, "which was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Appeal, was commuted to one of life imprisonment. Dr Mannheimer has never ceased to believe in the innocence of his client and to plead his case. The poison, called strophantin, he declared, was administered by the doctor to the nurse in the course of medical treatment which the nurse was undergoing. The poison, in itself, was not capable of causing death, and the nurse’s death was due to other causes. A few weeks ago this view was strikingly confirmed by Professor Flury, the chief of the Wurzburg University Medical Faculty. Dr Mannheimer, in a fifty-page statement to the Ministry of Justice, has demanded a retrial of Dr Richter, stating that both his client and himself are prepared to take strophantin in exactly the same quantity, and by exactly the same method, as was said to have caused the death of Nurse Mertens, in order to prove the harm- ! lessness of the poison and the innocence of Richter.