ON Friday a Norwegian court will hand down its verdict on Anders Behring
Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, detonated a bomb in central Oslo,
killing eight people and wounding hundreds more, then drove to Utoya
Island, where he shot and killed 69 participants in the Norwegian Labor
Party’s youth camp.
The world’s attention is focused on whether the court will find Mr.
Breivik guilty or criminally insane, and there has already been much
debate about how the court handled the question of his sanity. But there
is far more to it. Because it gave space to the story of each
individual victim, allowed their families to express their loss and
listened to the voices of the wounded, the Breivik trial provides a new
model for justice in cases of terrorism and civilian mass murder.
It is true that, on one level, the trial is not just about the state of
Mr. Breivik’s mind but forensic psychiatry itself. The trial featured two psychiatric reports,
the first concluding that at the time of the crime Mr. Breivik was
psychotic and delusional, the other that he was rational. The spectacle
of two teams of psychiatrists brandishing the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders and its Norwegian equivalent, only to draw
radically opposed conclusions, undermined many Norwegians’ faith in
forensic psychiatry.
This is a New York Times op-ed. Breivik was found sane and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Tom
No comments:
Post a Comment