ABSTRACT
The German legal system contains the common division of the three main branches of civil, public, and criminal law. The criminal procedure in Germany is not adversary but inquisitorial, that is, the courts are actively involved in investigating the facts of the case. The trial only has one phase with a decision both on the facts of the case and on the legal consequences at its end. Decisions are made by courts, which consist of professional judges together with lay judges; independent juries do not exist in the German criminal procedure. Juvenile Criminal Law is applicable for offenders between 14 and 18 years. It focuses very much on the purpose of preventing future offences by educating juvenile offenders. The German High Court has ruled several times that judges have to clarify within the reasoning of their verdicts why they came to their conclusions, neither blindly following nor completely neglecting the outcome of forensic assessment.
