Anneli Auer's Sexual Crime Conviction Annulled

Expected Ruling

The Supreme Court has today, December 5, 2024, decided to annul the sexual crime conviction by which Anneli Auer and her then-boyfriend were sentenced to long prison terms for sexual crimes considered to have been committed against Auer's children. Both defendants denied all charges. Anneli Auer was ultimately found guilty of 12 different crimes and sentenced to 7 years and 6 months in prison. The other defendant was convicted of 11 different crimes and sentenced to 10 years in prison. They have both served their sentences as a continuation of pre-trial detention that began in 2011.

The evidence for the crimes consisted largely of accounts from Auer's three children, born between 1999 and 2004. The oldest child, born in 1997, consistently denied that any sexual acts had been committed against them or their siblings. At the time the accounts were given, the children were placed with Auer's brother, as Auer herself was in custody suspected of murdering her husband.

All the children are now adults. One after another, they have admitted that the accounts of sexual crimes given at the time are not true at all. The children's explanations of why they lied during the criminal investigation were submitted as attachments to the appeal for reversal to the Supreme Court in February 2023. They have subsequently been interrogated in a National Bureau of Investigation inquiry, where they confirmed that the accounts used as evidence at the time are not true.

The Supreme Court has now decided to annul the said judgments of the Turku Court of Appeal and the District Court of Southwest Finland. The case is remanded to the district court.

The Supreme Court did not arrange the oral hearing we requested to hear the children. Perhaps precisely for this reason, the Supreme Court concluded that sufficient evidence had not yet been presented on the basis of which it could have been established that the previous judgment was probably wrong. Since the decision was overturned due to very compelling reasons supporting reassessment, it was not necessary to hear the children personally in the Supreme Court.

Dr. Markku Fredman, who prepared the applications for extraordinary appeal, commented on the Supreme Court's decision as follows:

"In accordance with our request, the case has today been remanded to the District Court of Southwest Finland. The case is at the stage there where the charges are still pending and the district court will begin to ascertain whether the prosecutor wishes to maintain the charges or modify them. If the prosecutor maintains the charges, the district court will arrange a new trial in the case, where evidence presented by the parties will be received. The children would now be heard for the first time in a courtroom."

"In our view, the prosecutor no longer has the necessary probable cause to pursue the charges in this case. The law requires that the prosecutor must consider it probable that they will be able to prove the defendant guilty with the available evidence. Now that the children, having reached adulthood, have independently and in detail, independently of each other and their mother, explained what caused them to lie at the time, there is no evidence in the case that could even probably lead to conviction of the crimes in a new trial."

Both appellants are extremely relieved by the decision and hope that the processing of the case would end here, and that the prosecutor would not continue the trial. It would cause them unreasonable suffering. They have no other comments regarding the matter.