Anders Behring Breivik ‘should be declared insane’

Defence lawyer Geir Lippestad is expected on Friday to call on the judges to
overrule the prosecution’s recommendations, even though this could mean his
client faces 21 years in prison.

The prosecution’s recommendation is also likely to distress the victims’
families, who lobbied hard for the court to commission a second official
psychiatric report, after the first diagnosed him as schizophrenic last
November.

The second report by concluded that Breivik was sufficiently sane to face a
prison sentence, despite signs of narcissistic and anti-social personality
disorder.

Mr Holden’s colleague, Inga Bejer Engh, insisted that the recommendation did
not downplay the brutality of Breivik’s attacks.

“The actions are so horrible that they go far beyond our comprehension,” she
told the court. “The actions are not the result of a momentary impulse, but
of meticulous planning over more than a year, in which the desire to kill as
many people as possible has been the driving force.”

Breivik’s sanity has been the key question for the court, as he has already
confessed both to planting a bomb that killed eight people in Oslo last
July, and to a shooting rampage that left 69 dead at a youth camp on the
island of Utoya.

Mr Holden said the prosecution had not been convinced by the delusion the
authors of the first report, Synne Sorheim and Torgeir Husby, advanced as
their core evidence that for Breivik’s schizophrenia: that he believed he a
mandate which gave him the right to decide who should live and who should
die.

But they said that under Norwegian law, this was not enough.

“It is worse that a psychotic be sentenced to custody than a non-psychotic is
sentenced to psychiatric care,” he said as he was building up to the
conclusion.

The Oslo district court has said that the panel of five judges will make its
final ruling on July 20 or August 24. The 10 week trial wraps up today
with the defence’s closing arguments.

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