Update: Söring lawsuit quashed, "evil people", New DNA Testing (?)

Jens Söring officially concedes defeat in his lawsuit against me, and talks of "truth" and "evil people" in a church podcast. Plus: Does Jens Söring want DNA testing? (No.)

[Google-Übersetzung hier]

Sorry about the light posting lately, I’ve been catching up on some work. This post is a brief update about that issue, and about an interesting recent media appearance by Söring.

Söring concedes defeat

After the judges of the Frankfurt Regional Court asked Söring’s lawyers several pointed questions on June 3, 2022, they decided to withdraw their application for a temporary injunction against me. This didn’t quite end the matter, though, since merely withdrawing a lawsuit doesn’t provide any guarantee it won’t be filed again. So my excellent lawyer David Ziegelmayer, whom I can strongly recommend, poked and prodded a bit. Today I received a declaration from Jens Söring’s lawyer that he will not further pursue his lawsuit against me. So the threat of a lawsuit from Jens Söring is likely now very low, since losers pay in German lawsuits, and Söring will have to pay a sizable chunk of money in attorneys’ fees and court costs.

This is good news. My comments were free speech, clearly protected by Article 5 of Germany’s Basic Law. His lawsuit was meritless. The dispute I have with Söring about his innocence claims is something that should be carried out in the court of public opinion, not the German law courts, which have enough on their plate already.

Söring plans book on truth and denounces “evil people”

Back in May, a Protestant pastor who makes radio features for North German Radio broadcast a “Word on Sunday” which included an interview with Jens Söring. I found that a bit peculiar, since Söring has publicly stated that he no longer believes in Christianity and is, well, an unrepentant murderer. Other listeners complained about this, and the radio station issued a milquetoast statement a few weeks later in which, like so many other Germany media companies, they apologized for giving listeners the impression that the radio station endorsed Söring’s innocence claims.

However, that pastor, Marco Voigt, was not done with Söring. He has apparently read both of Söring’s German-language books about his case and finds Söring’s story fascinating. So he released another interview with Söring, this time on a church podcast (g) named “Sinn:Suche” (a play on the German word for a search for meaning):

Most of the interview deals with unproblematic stuff such as Söring’s thoughts on religion and his prison experiences. However, two things caught my ear. First, at one point, Söring announces that he’s working on a book about the concept of “truth”. I imagine he’ll build on various comments he’s made over the years about how the truth is relative, everyone has their own truth, there are multiple “truths”, etc. I think we can all understand why Söring would be interested in undermining the idea of objective truth.

There’s also a slightly sinister passage near the end of the interview. Here it is, with my subtitles:

This passage gives us insight into two aspects of Söring’s thinking. First, notice how the most important passage in the Bible for him, he claims, is about sacrificing himself for another person. He identifies it as the very passage which converted him to Christianity! This is of a piece with many of Söring’s other comments on literary works: He seems to understand them primarily in terms of how he can use them to put his own innocence story into a broader literary context. He often invokes “Macbeth” to explain Elizabeth Haysom’s (i.e., Lady Macbeth’s) nefarious manipulations.

He even chose a line from Dickens as the title for his 2017 book about his case with journalist Bill Sizemore “A Far, Far Better Thing”. That line references a plotline in Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” involving an Englishman named Sydney Carton, who

feels a deep unrequited love for Lucie Manette, who nevertheless inspires him to try to be a better person. Near the end of the novel, Carton manages to change places with Lucie's husband, Charles Darnay, hours before Darnay's scheduled execution in France, giving his life for Lucie's sake. Later, Lucie and Charles name their second son after Carton….

Carton's final words - or rather, what Dickens suggests could have been his final words, had he been given the time to verbalize his final thoughts - are among the most famous in English literature:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known

It’s hard to overestimate how central Söring’s innocence claim is to his current mindset — even now, even more than two years after his release. And what does Söring think about people who challenge his story? They’re “evil people” who have done “very evil things” to him. You can hear him pausing to find radio-friendly words as he seethes with resentment. It’s a bit chilling, if you ask me.

At this point, I think it’s time to do what Marco Voigt (and every other German media personality who has ever interviewed Söring) declines to do: set the record straight. Jens Söring indeed killed Derek and Nancy Haysom. He confessed and was fairly convicted, and his complaints about his conviction have been reviewed and dismissed. His innocence story was a desperate invention and is internally inconsistent and implausible. The jury was right to unanimously reject it. His protestations that he sacrificed his freedom to save Elizabeth Haysom are simply a story, a fiction, gaslighting. And his obvious smoldering resentment toward Haysom and all of the other people who have questioned his story is based on his belief in his own invented story.

He resents Elizabeth Haysom, myself, and others not because we’re lying about him, but because we’re telling the truth about him. It’s really that simple. So einfach ist das.

New DNA Testing?

As I noted the other day, the podcast Small Town Big Crime will release three episodes on June 28, 2022, which is great news. They just released a 2-minute teaser trailer for subscribers which you can listen to here. The focus seems to be on testing the evidence in the case — we hear soundbites about the condition of the evidence, new DNA testing methods, and other related subjects. In particular, STBC seems to have followed up on my suggestion that new, cutting-edge DNA analysis techniques might well be able to yield much more precise results about the donors of various DNA samples at the crime scene — one voice in the trailer states that new DNA techniques can “crack” cases right now that would have been impossible to solve even one year ago.

At one point, someone — it sounds like John Grisham — says: “We on the other side are saying we have nothing to hide. Jens would love to see the [sounds like “test”]. Let’s do further testing with new DNA technology, yet they refuse to do it.”

Er, Grisham is wrong. Söring has an enormous amount to hide, which is why he has never signed a waiver of attorney-client privilege, which would allow his former lawyers to speak freely. Further, Jens would not “love” to see new DNA testing. Three months ago, I posted an entry on my former blog called “Has Jens Söring ever asked for DNA testing?”. I invited anyone with information about this to come forward and point to any public statement Söring has ever made in which he unequivocally asked for new DNA testing.

Nobody found anything. Söring has never once publicly requested that the evidence in his case be submitted for DNA testing, even though Virginia law has allowed for this possibility since 2001. There are statements (like Grisham’s) in which Söring’s supporters say they want/he wants DNA testing, but, as I pointed out in the former post, those statements mean very little. Söring can hardly discourage his own supporters from mentioning DNA without raising the question of…why he would discourage his supporters from mentioning DNA.

So, did STBC gain access to the evidence? Was a state-of-the-art DNA analysis performed on it? Did the results implicate Söring or point elsewhere? Subscribe to the podcast now, and tune in on 28 June for the results.

Just to keep myself honest, here’s my prediction of the likelihood of various outcomes:

• Bedford County refuses to release the evidence: 30%

• Evidence released & tested, results inconclusive: 60%

• Evidence released & tested, clear traces of Söring’s (& perhaps E. Haysom’s) DNA found at crime scene: 9.9%

• Evidence released & tested, evidence clearly points to presence of unknown person or persons at crime scene: .1%.

Tune in on the 28th to see how right, or wrong, I was!