Confessed mass murderer Anders Breivik, self-described "military commander in the Norwegian resistance movement and Knight Templar Norway," had his first public court hearing in Oslo on Monday. "I acknowledge the acts, but I do not plead guilty," he said, adding that the court had no legitimacy because it was sanctioned by multiculturalism, "a hateful ideology that aims to destroy Norwegian society." The judge remanded his custody through early February. Breivik's lawyer, Geir Lippestad, has asked that his client be freed. He must also be insane.
Brievik requested permission to address the relatives of his victims, who had been permitted in the courtroom with him for the first time. What might he possibly have said to the mothers and fathers of the children he slaughtered? The judge denied Brievik's request, and ruled that he is to remain in solitary confinement. He will be allowed access to newspapers and visitors next month. His "sadistic torture" continues.
Breivik's trial is tentatively scheduled to begin in April. Before then, the courtroom will be restructured to double its current capacity, and include a press center for the hundreds of journalists expected to be covering the trial. Breivik faces up to twenty one years in prison. That's not a typo. It's not a sick joke. The man who murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers, in a record three hour killing spree last June, could be a free man under Norwegian law by the time he reaches his mid fifties. If additionally charged under "crimes against humanity" he could be out by his early sixties.
I can't honestly imagine that, law or no law, Anders Brievik will ever walk free. Some loophole, even in liberal, rights' vigilant Norway, surely will be found to keep him locked up in a cage forever. In a perverse way, it's unfortunate. If by some miracle he ever was released, vigilante justice presumably will quickly, finally, end his life. But I believe he'll spend the rest of his existence confined within and provided for by the very maternalistic state that he railed against.
Maybe that was his deepest intention of his apocalyptic rampage. To crawl back into the symbolic womb of the state.
