## Facts

- A German trial court, in a pending murder prosecution, referred the constitutionality of a criminal statute mandating life imprisonment for murder to the Federal Constitutional Court.
- The challenged provision defined murder by enumerated aggravating features and prescribed a mandatory life sentence upon conviction.
- The referring court argued that mandatory life imprisonment could violate constitutional guarantees of human dignity, personal freedom, and rule-of-law constraints, especially where continued confinement might effectively last until death.
- At the time, earlier release for life prisoners depended largely on executive clemency, and there was no general statutory scheme specifying conditions and procedures for suspending the remainder of a life sentence.
- The referral also questioned whether two aggravating features—perfidious killing and killing to cover up another offense—were overbroad when coupled with a mandatory life sentence.

## Issues

1. Whether mandatory life imprisonment for murder violates constitutional human dignity and related fundamental-rights protections.
2. Whether the constitution requires a legally defined, realistic possibility of release for persons sentenced to life imprisonment, beyond discretionary executive clemency.
3. Whether treating perfidious killing and cover-up killing as murder triggering mandatory life imprisonment violates proportionality unless interpreted narrowly.

## Decision

- The court held that life imprisonment for murder is not unconstitutional per se.
- Based on available evidence and then-existing prison conditions and clemency practice, the court did not find that enforcement of life sentences necessarily causes irreparable psychological or physical harm amounting to a violation of human dignity.
- The court ruled that human dignity and the rule-of-law principle require that a person sentenced to life imprisonment must, in principle, retain a real chance to regain liberty.
- The court held that executive pardon alone is insufficient; statutory law must define the conditions and procedures under which enforcement of a life sentence may be suspended.
- The court upheld classifying perfidious killing and cover-up killing as murder, provided these categories are interpreted restrictively to satisfy proportionality.

## Legal Principles

- Human dignity permits severe punishment for grave crimes, including life imprisonment, but limits the manner and aims of sentence enforcement.
- A life sentence is compatible with human dignity only if the legal order preserves, as a rule, a realistic prospect of release at some point in the future.
- The rule-of-law principle requires legislative regulation of both (a) substantive criteria for suspending further enforcement of a life sentence and (b) the procedures for deciding such suspension; discretionary clemency is not an adequate substitute.
- To avoid disproportionate results from mandatory life imprisonment, statutory murder aggravators must be construed narrowly so that only especially blameworthy killings fall within the mandatory life-imprisonment category.

## Conclusion

The court upheld mandatory life imprisonment for murder as constitutionally permissible, but required that the legal system provide a genuine, statute-based path to potential release and that murder aggravators triggering mandatory life sentences be applied under a restrictive, proportionality-consistent interpretation.


Lebenslange Freiheitsstrafe (German Life Imprisonment Case), 45 BVerfGE 187 (BVerfG 1977)