An 18-year-old woman has been sentenced to five years of psychiatric care after being found guilty of giving a false witness testimony in a rape case three years ago.
The woman’s testimony lead to three men, who where were 16, 17 and 18 at the time, spending 14 months in jail for rape.
But after the younger brother of one of the accused secretly recorded the girl admitting she lied about the rape, the three were retried, cleared and each given compensation of between 600,000 and 700,000 kroner.
In court yesterday, the woman was found guilty of having lied about the involvement of two of the men who she said held her down while the third man allegedly raped her in the handicapped toilet at Fredericia train station on 13 September 2008.
One of the three imprisoned men, Sharif Saloni, said he was disappointed that the girl did not receive a prison sentence.
“She ought to feel a little bit of what we felt when we were locked up,” Saloni said, according to Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “Nobody deserves to go through what we went through.”
Saloni also expressed disappointment that the court did not find the woman guilty of lying that he raped her, and instead found only that she lied about the two other men holding her down.
According to the prosecutor, it was not possible to find her guilty of lying about the rape, as it could not be proved that she did not think she was raped.
“We need to put ourselves inside the girls head,” prosecutor Birte Wirnfeldt told Jyllands-Posten. “What was she thinking when she testified against Sharif Saloni? We cannot disprove that she felt raped. But still, that is not the same as saying a rape took place.”
The girl received a five year psychiatric sentence after her psychiatric report showed she had a very low mental capacity.
The girl will now spend at least one year in a psychiatric institution.
