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'Sane' Breivik gets 21 years, regrets not killing more
READ ON http://on.rt.com/sy1t07 Norwegian mass murderer Anders Brevik - who admitted killing 77 people, and taunted the court with Nazi salutes - has been de...
Thank you my friend TSgt Joe C. for making us aware that on August 24, 2012 33-year-old right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. He killed 77 people in a July 22, 2011, bombing and shooting attack in Norway.
Image: 2012-08-24 Anders Behring Breivik in an Oslo courtroom on Friday. He won his effort to be declared sane, and avoid a mental hospital.
Background from nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/europe/anders-behring-breivik-murder-trial.html
"OSLO — Convicted of killing 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting attack in July last year, the Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivikwas sentenced on Friday to 21 years in prison — fewer than four months per victim — ending a case that thoroughly tested this gentle country’s collective commitment to values like tolerance, nonviolence and merciful justice.
Mr. Breivik, lawyers say, will live in a prison outside Oslo in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop, albeit one without Internet access. If he is not considered a threat after serving his sentence, the maximum available under Norwegian law, he will be eligible for release in 2033, at the age of 53.
However, his demeanor, testimony and declaration that he would have liked to kill more people helped convince the judges that, however lenient the sentence seems, Mr. Breivik is unlikely ever to be released from prison. He could be kept there indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions to his sentence.
The relative leniency of the sentence imposed on Mr. Breivik, the worst criminal modern Scandinavia has known, is no anomaly. Rather, it is consistent with Norway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe — and in contrast with much of the United States, whose criminal justice system is considered by many Europeans to be cruelly punitive — Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.
Even some parents who lost children in the attack appeared to be satisfied with the verdict, seeing it as fair punishment that would allow the country, perhaps, to move past its trauma.
“Now we won’t hear about him for quite a while; now we can have peace and quiet,” Per Balch Soerensen, whose daughter was among the dead, told TV2, according to The Associated Press. He felt no personal rancor toward Mr. Breivik, he was quoted as saying.
“He doesn’t mean anything to me,” Mr. Soerensen said. “He is just air.”
Even more than a year later, the events of that day are still almost impossible to fathom, so brutally, methodically and callously was the attack carried out. After setting off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, Mr. Breivik made his way to tiny Utoya Island, where, dressed as a police officer and toting a virtual arsenal of weapons, he calmly and systematically hunted down and shot dead 69 others, most of them young people attending a summer camp run by the Labor Party. Hundreds were wounded.
Norway’s soft-touch approach, which defers to the rights of the accused and the rights of victims as much as it gives weight to the arguments of prosecutors, informed every aspect of Mr. Breivik’s trial. As the accused, he was given ample time to speak of his rambling, anti-Muslim, anti-multicultural political views, which included a rant about the “deconstruction” of Norway at the hands of “cultural Marxists.”
He interrupted witnesses freely, smiled when the verdict was announced and entered court on Friday making a fascist salute, his right fist clenched.
“The thoughts of murder were evidently stimulating for the defendant,” Judge Arne Lyng said, reading from the 90-page judgment. “This was clear when he talked about decapitating ex-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.” It is hard to imagine, the judgment continues, “that such a term-limited sentence is sufficient to protect this country from this man.”
As the court listened to the killer, so it listened to his victims, who were treated in the proceedings with care, even tenderness. The court heard 77 autopsy reports, listened to short biographies describing the lives of each of the dead and allowed the survivors to describe in great detail what happened and how it has affected them since.
“At first I was shot in the arms and I thought, ‘O.K., I can survive this; it’s O.K. if you’re shot in the arms,’ ” Ina Rangones Libak, 22, said in May in testimony that had spectators laughing and crying by turns, according to news accounts at the time. “Then I was shot in the jaw. I thought, ‘O.K., this is a lot more serious.’ Then I was shot in the chest and I thought, ‘O.K., this is going to kill me.’ ”
But as she lay there, she heard a friend say, “We can’t leave Ina here,” and she was then cradled by a group who hid together even as Mr. Breivik shot others nearby, taking off their clothes to use as tourniquets. In the end, Ms. Libak told the court, “We are stronger than ever.”
The sense that Mr. Breivik’s hateful beliefs should not be allowed to fill Norway with hate, too, was part of the country’s response to the attacks from the beginning. In April, tens of thousands of people around the country gathered for a mass singalong of “Children of the Rainbow,” a song Mr. Breivik denounced in court as Marxist propaganda, to show that he had not shattered their commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness.
Mr. Breivik’s guilt was never at issue in the 10-week trial, which ended in June; the question was whether he was sane, as he claimed, or insane, as the prosecutors argued. On Friday, a five-panel judge ruled him sane and gave him what he had sought: incarceration in a regular prison, not a mental hospital.
Many said they did not mind that Mr. Breivik prevailed in his argument, since the court’s declaration that he was not insane forced him to be accountable for what he had done.
“I am relieved to see this verdict,” said Tore Sinding Beddekal, who survived the shootings on Utoya by hiding in a storeroom. “The temptation for people to fob him off as a madman has gone. It would have been difficult to unite the concept of insanity with the level of detail in his planning.”
Unni Espeland Marcussen, whose 16-year-old daughter, Andrine, was killed by Mr. Breivik, said: “I will never get my daughter Andrine back, but I also think that the man who murdered her has to take responsibility, and that’s good.”
Bjorn Magnus Ihler, who survived the Utoya shootings, said that Norway’s treatment of Mr. Breivik was a sign of a fundamentally civilized nation.
“If he is deemed not to be dangerous any more after 21 years, then he should be released,” Mr. Ihler said. “That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles, and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed our society.”
Sane' Breivik gets 21 years, regrets not killing more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTMprMveoYU
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT Mark Halmrast PO1 William "Chip" Nagel CPT Gabe SnellLTC Greg Henning
Image: 2012-08-24 Anders Behring Breivik in an Oslo courtroom on Friday. He won his effort to be declared sane, and avoid a mental hospital.
Background from nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/europe/anders-behring-breivik-murder-trial.html
"OSLO — Convicted of killing 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting attack in July last year, the Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivikwas sentenced on Friday to 21 years in prison — fewer than four months per victim — ending a case that thoroughly tested this gentle country’s collective commitment to values like tolerance, nonviolence and merciful justice.
Mr. Breivik, lawyers say, will live in a prison outside Oslo in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop, albeit one without Internet access. If he is not considered a threat after serving his sentence, the maximum available under Norwegian law, he will be eligible for release in 2033, at the age of 53.
However, his demeanor, testimony and declaration that he would have liked to kill more people helped convince the judges that, however lenient the sentence seems, Mr. Breivik is unlikely ever to be released from prison. He could be kept there indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions to his sentence.
The relative leniency of the sentence imposed on Mr. Breivik, the worst criminal modern Scandinavia has known, is no anomaly. Rather, it is consistent with Norway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe — and in contrast with much of the United States, whose criminal justice system is considered by many Europeans to be cruelly punitive — Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.
Even some parents who lost children in the attack appeared to be satisfied with the verdict, seeing it as fair punishment that would allow the country, perhaps, to move past its trauma.
“Now we won’t hear about him for quite a while; now we can have peace and quiet,” Per Balch Soerensen, whose daughter was among the dead, told TV2, according to The Associated Press. He felt no personal rancor toward Mr. Breivik, he was quoted as saying.
“He doesn’t mean anything to me,” Mr. Soerensen said. “He is just air.”
Even more than a year later, the events of that day are still almost impossible to fathom, so brutally, methodically and callously was the attack carried out. After setting off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, Mr. Breivik made his way to tiny Utoya Island, where, dressed as a police officer and toting a virtual arsenal of weapons, he calmly and systematically hunted down and shot dead 69 others, most of them young people attending a summer camp run by the Labor Party. Hundreds were wounded.
Norway’s soft-touch approach, which defers to the rights of the accused and the rights of victims as much as it gives weight to the arguments of prosecutors, informed every aspect of Mr. Breivik’s trial. As the accused, he was given ample time to speak of his rambling, anti-Muslim, anti-multicultural political views, which included a rant about the “deconstruction” of Norway at the hands of “cultural Marxists.”
He interrupted witnesses freely, smiled when the verdict was announced and entered court on Friday making a fascist salute, his right fist clenched.
“The thoughts of murder were evidently stimulating for the defendant,” Judge Arne Lyng said, reading from the 90-page judgment. “This was clear when he talked about decapitating ex-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.” It is hard to imagine, the judgment continues, “that such a term-limited sentence is sufficient to protect this country from this man.”
As the court listened to the killer, so it listened to his victims, who were treated in the proceedings with care, even tenderness. The court heard 77 autopsy reports, listened to short biographies describing the lives of each of the dead and allowed the survivors to describe in great detail what happened and how it has affected them since.
“At first I was shot in the arms and I thought, ‘O.K., I can survive this; it’s O.K. if you’re shot in the arms,’ ” Ina Rangones Libak, 22, said in May in testimony that had spectators laughing and crying by turns, according to news accounts at the time. “Then I was shot in the jaw. I thought, ‘O.K., this is a lot more serious.’ Then I was shot in the chest and I thought, ‘O.K., this is going to kill me.’ ”
But as she lay there, she heard a friend say, “We can’t leave Ina here,” and she was then cradled by a group who hid together even as Mr. Breivik shot others nearby, taking off their clothes to use as tourniquets. In the end, Ms. Libak told the court, “We are stronger than ever.”
The sense that Mr. Breivik’s hateful beliefs should not be allowed to fill Norway with hate, too, was part of the country’s response to the attacks from the beginning. In April, tens of thousands of people around the country gathered for a mass singalong of “Children of the Rainbow,” a song Mr. Breivik denounced in court as Marxist propaganda, to show that he had not shattered their commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness.
Mr. Breivik’s guilt was never at issue in the 10-week trial, which ended in June; the question was whether he was sane, as he claimed, or insane, as the prosecutors argued. On Friday, a five-panel judge ruled him sane and gave him what he had sought: incarceration in a regular prison, not a mental hospital.
Many said they did not mind that Mr. Breivik prevailed in his argument, since the court’s declaration that he was not insane forced him to be accountable for what he had done.
“I am relieved to see this verdict,” said Tore Sinding Beddekal, who survived the shootings on Utoya by hiding in a storeroom. “The temptation for people to fob him off as a madman has gone. It would have been difficult to unite the concept of insanity with the level of detail in his planning.”
Unni Espeland Marcussen, whose 16-year-old daughter, Andrine, was killed by Mr. Breivik, said: “I will never get my daughter Andrine back, but I also think that the man who murdered her has to take responsibility, and that’s good.”
Bjorn Magnus Ihler, who survived the Utoya shootings, said that Norway’s treatment of Mr. Breivik was a sign of a fundamentally civilized nation.
“If he is deemed not to be dangerous any more after 21 years, then he should be released,” Mr. Ihler said. “That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles, and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed our society.”
Sane' Breivik gets 21 years, regrets not killing more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTMprMveoYU
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT Mark Halmrast PO1 William "Chip" Nagel CPT Gabe SnellLTC Greg Henning
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I bet the Norwegian prisons are more like Lompoc a white collar prison where they can play volleyball and for all we know he may even be allowed to go out for the weekend
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SFC Shirley Whitfield MSG Mark Million COL Lee Flemming LTC (Join to see) PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SSgt Harvey "Skip" Porter SCPO Morris Ramsey SFC William Farrell Alan K. LTC Greg Henning SSgt (Join to see) MSgt Stephen Council Sgt Trevor Barrett Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MSG Andrew White SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth Cpl Scott McCarroll LTC John Shaw LTC John Griscom
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