OSLO — Convicted of killing 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting
attack in July last year, the Norwegian extremist Anders Behring
Breivik
was 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 to 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 8 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.”
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