Prosecutors ask for mass killer Breivik to be sent to an asylum
NorWeGIaN prosecutors have asked a court to send confessed mass killer anders Behring Breivik to a mental institution instead of prison for the massacre of 77 people last year.
If the court comes to the same conclusion when it issues its ruling, expected next month, it would mean that Breivik will not be held criminally responsible for Norway’s worst peacetime massacre.
“We request that he is transferred to compulsory psychiatric care,” prosecutor Svein Holden told the court in closing arguments yesterday.
Though there is inconclusive evidence that Breivik was psychotic during the 22 July attacks, there were enough doubts about his sanity that he cannot be sentenced to prison under Norwegian law, the prosecutor said.
“In our opinion, it’s worse to send a psychotic person to preventive detention than to send a non-psychotic person to mandatory care,” Mr Holden told the court.
“We are not convinced that anders Behring Breivik is legally insane, but we are in doubt. So our petition is for a judgment that he shall be transferred to compulsory mental health care.”
The defence is likely to refute the insanity finding today, the last day of the ten-week trial. Breivik, who styles himself as an anti-Muslim militant, claims he is sane and that his attacks were motivated by his political views.
earlier in the trial, Breivik said the psychiatric dimension of the case was a way for Norwegian authorities to ridicule him and divert attention from his ideology. Some of those who lost family members in the massacre were disappointed by the decision to push for an insanity verdict.
“They say they want this to be a correct judgment,” said Mette Yvonne larsen, a lawyer for the bereaved. “They think that imprisonment would be a more justified outcome of what happened.”
Two teams of psychiatrists reached opposite conclusions about Breivik’s mental health. The first team diagnosed him with “paranoid schizophrenia,” a serious mental illness which would preclude a prison sentence. The second team found him legally sane, saying he suf- fers from a dissocial and narcissistic personality disorder, but is not psychotic.
prosecutors said one of the key challenges to Breivik’s sanity was his insistence of belonging to a militant anti-Muslim modeled after the Knights Templar, a Christian military order during the Crusades, even though investigators have found no trace of the network.
Though Breivik tried to tone down the significance of the network during the trial, he maintained that it exists and that there are two other cells in Norway.
after the
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yesterday, prosecutor Inga Bejer engh stressed that a commitment to psychiatric care would mean that Breivik would be put away for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life.
“We have murderers who have been sentenced to psychiatric care who will probably never get out again,” Ms engh said, noting that none of them had killed 77 people.
If the court opts for a prison term instead, prosecutors said their preference would be the maximum sentence of 21 years. a sentence can be extended beyond that if a prisoner is considered a menace to society.