ST POELTEN (Austria), March 19: Josef Fritzl was sentenced to life in a mental unit for locking up and raping his daughter in a cellar over 24 years, fathering seven children with her and causing the death of his own infant son.

“I accept the verdict,” the 73-year-old Austrian told the court after Thursday’s unanimous decision by the three-man, five-woman jury in a court west of Vienna. The prosecution also approved it, meaning the trial outcome cannot be appealed.

Fritzl, who kept Elisabeth and three of their children in the cellar below his home, would stay in St Poelten jail pending transfer to a unit for mentally ill offenders within a prison where he will receive psychotherapy, court officials said.

He had pleaded guilty in the four-day trial to incest, rape, enslavement, coercion and murder by neglect, for confining his daughter, now 42, in a purpose-built, windowless cellar under his home for almost a quarter century.

The lurid details of how Fritzl violated Elisabeth and kept
her and several children in a domestic dungeon horrified people worldwide who followed the case that emerged when he took one of incarcerated children, gravely ill, to hospital last April.

Fritzl will be closely monitored in case he tries to commit suicide, which the case’s psychiatrist called a serious risk, court officials said.

His condition will be re-evaluated in 15 years and, in theory, if he were deemed cured, he could be released, they said. But Fritzl and his lawyer have said they expected he would have to spend the rest of his life incarcerated.

The prosecution in the case had asked for Fritzl to be confined indefinitely to a secure psychiatric institution.

“I cannot do anything more about (what happened) ... I regret this from the bottom of my heart,” Fritzl said in his closing statement at his four-day trial.

Fritzl looked straight ahead as the jury, who had deliberated for three hours, convicted him of every charge.

Earlier in the trial, he had used a blue file folder to hide his face from public view.
Fritzl had initially denied the murder and slavery counts but reversed his plea after being shaken by 11 hours of videotaped testimony from daughter Elisabeth screened in court on Tuesday.

The retired electrical engineer was convicted of murder, the most serious charge, because the jury found he did nothing over a three-day period to seek medical help despite knowing the boy was in danger of dying from breathing problems.

Defence lawyer Rudolf Mayer confirmed reports Elisabeth had attended the trial on Tuesday and said Fritzl was “devastated”

when he spotted her in the gallery as the video was screened.

Mayer said he had nothing to do with the plea change.

In her closing argument, chief prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser said Fritzl had degraded Elisabeth to “a condition of total dependence and treated her like his property”.
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