GUILTY BUT INNOCENT?
By David Vance On November 29th, 2011
Did you see that psychiatrists assessing self-confessed Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik have concluded that he is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia?
They believe he was in a psychotic state both during and after the twin attacks on 22 July that led to the deaths of 77 people and injured 151. Their report must still be reviewed by a panel of forensic psychiatrists. Breivik will still be tried in April but it seems likely he will be placed in psychiatric care rather than prison.
Is this justice for those 77 slaughtered by this killer or is it a liberal opt out?
If he is actually insane then it would be wrong to punish him for an action that he had no control over.
“Is this justice for those 77 slaughtered by this killer”
A lifetime in a psychiatric hospital is definitely a less attractive option than life in a Norwegian prison.
BTW, I see they may soon release Hinkley (Sp?), the guy who shot R Reagan, from his psy. clinic.
COnservatives are supposed to support law and order. if he meets the standard to qualify for insanity then conservatives should support such a finding. Incidently, such confinements are often longer than prison terms (and as I recall there was some screwed up statute in Norway indicating a sadly lenient sentence if convicted of murder).
He may be sufficiently insane that he would go to a psychiatric facility for the remainder of his life.
They can’t release Hinckley. Imagine he sees Silence of the Lambs. Obama will be toast.
Bollocks. I would issue nail-studded baseball bats to the parents of his victims, and give them free reign to decide if he was “insane” or not. And I’d let the result serve as a warning to the next potentially “insane” murderer. I’d bet a few of them would suddenly regain a bit of ‘sanity’ before carrying out their crimes.
Which is why we have laws.
…Which is why he knew he could murder 77 people and at the very worst suffer nothing more than a nice cushy life behind bars.
Tom – Not guilty by reason of insanity would mean he didn’t know that.
Awwww, I’m so sowwy. Was he suffering from pre-traumatic non-law-responsiveness disorduuhh, or was he a victim of post-progressive (neo-condusive) non-cognisant temporal reverse-topographic deficiency? The poor LAMB. Everything is a result of some psycho-crap diagnosis these days, no-one is ever actually responsible for their actions, it’s all the fault of society, maaan. If only they had spotted it in his schooldays.
Tom – I’ve no regard for him. And I have no wish that he be found not guilty by reason of insanity. It is rarely granted in criminal cases, but the ones where it is are often noteworthy.
We first have to agree on some basic terms.
What does ‘insane’ mean? Off his rocker? Well yes, you have to have a screw loose to do what he did. But does insane mean he did not know what he was up to? Or did not understand his actions?
I’ve never been into psycho-babble voodoo. Most of it’s always seemed made up to me, a job creation scheme for head doctors. This doesn’t make me change my mind either. There’s no way Breivik was unaware of what he was doing.
That is the issue for me. If he thought that he was shooting space zombies from planet zog then fair enough he cannot be considered responsible fo rhis actions.
But if he can spend years planning a secret operation and putting forward a philisophical justification for what he did then he clearly knows that his actions were abhorrent.
Let’s see – Breivik, who is declared ‘insane’ managed to:
1. write a 1,500 page ‘manifesto’ whilst he was
2. assembling an arsenal of automatic weapons in the country which has the tightest controls on firearms, and the police knew nothing and
3. buying enough fertiliser for huge bombs to be let off in Oslo city centre
4. whilst he was away up north on a murderous shooting spree which lasted two hours (in the era of mobile phones)
5. following which he handed over his weapons to police who knew his name.
I would have thought that how he did it should at the very least be made known in a public court. But then, I wasn’t involved so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
In our skewed liberal world view insanity probably relates to the underlying motives-hating liberals and said world view-rather than his actions. Because any one who questions liberal ideology must be insane.It’s the hate/thought crime ‘what did for him’ To not declare him insane they are left with having to accept that his thoughts and opinions were rational, even though his response was deadly.
Considering he was trying to cleanse his country of the encroaching islamic horde by murdering 77 non-muslim children, It might be reasonable to qualify the man as insane.
By the way, why isn’t he being called a terrorist?
“By the way, why isn’t he being called a terrorist?”
Why should he be? He isn’t a Muslim; in fact, he hated Muslims.
He is a lone wolf terrorist.
I have zero interest in his sanity or lack of same. He should never walk the streets with free human beings ever again, regardless of anyone’s views on his mental state.
A lone wolf terrorist? Do you have any idea of the scale of planning, procurement and logistics which went into this murderous ‘project’? And now, all possibility of determining who else were involved is closed out – because the ‘lone wolf’ is insane. Bollocks to that!
That is how it appears to me
But I am sure that you have your own theories.
As many incidents show, a very small group – or even one person – can accomplish things that are quite outside the imagination of most.
You mean like – Bernanke, Paulson and Greenspan?
Funny, Noel.