Lois Epstein expressed a similar sentiment: “May your own eventual death occur as you have lived, in a solitary manner, without compassion or love.” Epstein’s husband, a professor of pediatrics, had lost his hand to another bomb.
McVeigh was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, at age thirty-three.
Both Kaczynski and McVeigh were frustrated that their trials didn’t allow them to tell the public their story. Their acts of terror, the bombings, were their twisted way of communicating with a world that wouldn’t otherwise listen. The lone wolf has a need to be heard and for the world to see how important he is, but McVeigh and Kaczynski did not receive this. Norway, however, gave Breivik exactly what he wished for.
THE SURVIVORS SPEAK
In the following days after Breivik was finally done, the lead prosecutor called on witnesses to the bombing, and the courtroom settled into an almost hypnotic trance as the awful stories of horror droned on.
On Day 8, Breivik took the stand again. He said that it had been a difficult task, listening to testimonies of those who were at the blast site. But he also let the court know that it was the Labor government, with its lax immigration policies, that was to blame. Then he contested the contents of the second psychiatric report, concluding that he was sane, insisting that although the conclusion was correct, the report was meant to portray him in a bad light. He alleged that almost all of it was false and spoke to several points in the report that sounded petty against the weight of the eyewitness accounts earlier rendered. No one seemed to care if it was untrue that he feared radiation or that his psychiatric evaluation wasn’t recorded.
More survivors gave testimony on the following few days. Harald Fosker, who worked at the Ministry of Justice, had been caught in the blast. He described how he would need surgery to reconstruct his face, hearing, and vision. So great were his injuries that he hadn’t felt any pain until the following day.
Meanwhile, forty thousand protesters gathered in Oslo. Singing a song called Children of the Rainbow, which Breivik had claimed brainwashed Norwegian children, they marched, in a respectful demonstration of unity, to the courthouse. Not because they were critical of the legal system and Breivik’s trial. They gathered in front of the courthouse to demonstrate their sympathy for the victims and their disapproval of Breivik’s political views. Many more such protests took place in other cities around the country.
On Day 10, Tore Raasok, employed in the Ministry of Transport, spoke of his injuries that had required ten surgeries, including the amputation of a leg. Shards of glass had flown into his eyes, and he had lost the use of one arm.
On the 11th of May, the autopsy reports were concluded, and again the court seemed to sway in an agitated state of remorse for the victims. Suddenly, someone shouted “Go to hell! Go to hell! You killed my brother!” Then the cursing man stood and threw a shoe toward Breivik. Instead, he hit Vibeke Hein Bæra, a member of his defense team.
The disrupter, Hayder Mustafa Qasim, was escorted out of the courtroom to a round of spontaneous applause and handed over to the medical staff. Many present knew that shoe-throwing marked extreme contempt among the Arab people, reserved for villains not worth the dirt one steps on. The footage captured by the videographer wasn’t released to the public.
After a break, Breivik announced to the court that if someone wished to throw something, they could throw it on him as he entered and left the courtroom. “Do not throw anything at my lawyers. Thank you.”
The mood in the room darkened again the next day as fifteen-year-old Ylva Helene Schwenke displayed her scars from wounds she had received on the island, saying that the four bullets marked “the price for democracy” she had paid. She concluded her statement by saying that democracy had prevailed. And in the nightmarish atmosphere, Anders Breivik was caught smiling at her commentary.
He merely shook his head slowly as another young female spoke of being saved by a young man who had thrown himself into Breivik’s line of fire to save her life. “Breivik laughed with joy as he continued his bloodbath,” she said.
Mathias Eckhoff testified to demanding that Breivik show his identification when he and others encountered Breivik, dressed in full combat gear, outside the island’s café, where they had been discussing news of the downtown bombing earlier that afternoon. Eckhoff, along with the others who had assembled, had been shot. Bullets had ripped through both of his legs and his scrotum, yet the 21-year-old had managed to escape once he jumped into the water, by using only his arms as he swam away from the carnage.
Also twenty-one, Mohamad Hadi Hamel asked that Breivik be removed from the room as he testified from his wheelchair. He had been shot in the abdomen, shoulder, and thigh. He had endured amputations of an arm and a leg. The price he had paid had been enormous, and he didn’t want to face the man responsible for all the wreckage to his young body.
The next witness, Adrian Pracon, however, looked straight into the defendant’s eyes as he answered questions about how, after shooting him in the shoulder, the shooter for some reason hadn’t finished him off.
“Breivik made an error when he decided to spare me,” he said, gazing steadfastly at his attacker. “Now, I really understand how fragile our society is. I see how much it is worth and the importance of politics. I will continue with politics,” he said, as if making a promise to Breivik, “and the Labor Party remains close to my heart.”
It didn’t go unnoticed that his comment made Breivik visibly uncomfortable, and that Pracon had been the only victim to look at the defendant in such a challenging way.
STRIVING FOR SANITY
Breivik, McVeigh, and Kaczynski each wanted to be taken seriously. Thus, they all rejected insanity as a defense, even when their lawyers argued otherwise. On Day 35, the fifth of June, Breivik’s defense attorneys invited right-wing extremists to testify at the trial as a way of portraying him as sane. Ironically, these were the last people Breivik would have wanted speaking in his defense.
Tore Tvedt, founder of Vigrid, and Arne Tumyr, of Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN), insisted that many people shared Breivik’s political views, without being violent and certainly without being insane. The extremists distanced themselves from Breivik’s actions, yet they openly supported his political views. Arne Tumyr said “Islam is an evil political ideology disguised as a religion.”
Ronny Alte, another witness, said that although he didn’t personally know anyone who supported Breivik’s actions, “there could easily be around a hundred that I know about” on the Internet who did.
The extremists were there to show that the madman was truly sane. What they showed were the first signs that Breivik, regardless of the trial’s outcome, was on his way to political rock-star status. None of the extremists appeared remorseful regarding Breivik’s killings.
On June 17, the first panel’s testimony consisted of a long and dreary description of how Breivik was psychotic and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Breivik rolled his eyes and smiled throughout, as if amused by how ridiculous it all sounded.
On June 18 and 19, the court-appointed psychiatrists from the second panel, Aspaas and Tørrissen, said that they acknowledged the political context of Breivik’s thoughts and actions. Thus, they saw no sign of psychosis. Standing by their previous report, Breivik was a political terrorist with a psychological profile that made it possible to comprehend his terrible acts.
The trial of United States v. Timothy J. McVeigh began on April 24, 1997. McVeigh didn’t deny the bombing, but he never acknowledged any guilt either. Perhaps because of the magnitude of his crime, this trial was also a media circus, created by McVeigh’s defense team and the press. The media published some stories, partly leaked by his own defense team, that McVeigh thought damaging to his chance of a fair trial. Several times he attempted to have new attorneys assigned to his case. The defense team maintained conspiracy theories as a strategy, much to the frustration of the prosecutor, who claimed that these various theor
ies sent the prosecution on a far-fetched fishing expedition. McVeigh was also frustrated. He wanted Jones, his lead attorney, to argue necessary defense and to stop trying to blame someone else for the attack.
Kaczynski was equally unhappy with his attorneys, who—instead of letting him use the trial to promote his philosophy—wouldn’t let go of arguing insanity as a defense. In the end, Kaczynski interrupted the trial and asked to speak with the judge. The private session lasted hours before the judge finally allowed Kaczynski to defend himself.
Like Breivik, McVeigh refused to show any emotion during the prosecution’s testimonies. While the prosecution recalled the stories of the different victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, including the small children who died, he remained unfazed, smiling and joking with his lawyers, making eye contact with attractive female journalists, or breaking into a grin when something he heard struck him as funny.
Conversely, Breivik, during his trial, would take turns looking directly at each of the fifteen press photographers following his trial and posing for their cameras.
McVeigh said something about his lack of emotions during the trial that might shed a light on Breivik’s state of mind: “The victims are looking for some show of remorse. I understand and empathize with the victims’ losses, but at the same time, I’m a realist. Death and loss are an integral part of life everywhere. We have to accept it and move on. To these people in Oklahoma who lost a loved one, I’m sorry, but it happens every day. You’re not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the world. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a fetal ball, and cry just because the victims want me to do that.”
On June 2, 1997, after twenty-three and a half hours of deliberations over four days, the jury had reached its verdict. McVeigh was found guilty of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of such weapon, destruction of government property with explosives, and eight counts of first-degree murder of the federal law-enforcement agents killed in the blast.
McVeigh remained expressionless as the verdict was being read. Both McVeigh and Breivik used the term “collateral damage” to describe their victims. Neither of them had any remorse.
On Friday, June 13, 1997, Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death by lethal injection. According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh felt that he hadn’t gotten a fair trial and was frustrated that America had not been told his side of the story. At the sentencing, he made a statement quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a hero to advocates for individual rights: “He wrote,” McVeigh said, “‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’ That’s all I have.”
Then he was taken by helicopter to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, known as “Supermax,” where Kaczynski would soon join him.
Breivik never denied the killings, the defense made clear in its closing speech. Thus, he was sane. Svein Holden, the prosecutor, argued that because the first psychiatric report was written in a non-falsifiable manner, it was impossible to disprove that Breivik was insane. Thus, he should be committed to psychiatric care because there would be more harm in sentencing a psychotic person to an ordinary prison than a non-psychotic person to a psychiatric facility.
On the forty-third and last day of the trial, Breivik delivered a forty-five-minute defense speech, as if his days of promoting his political ideas during the earlier days of the trial had not been enough. Although the court had refused video or audio transmission of this speech, it appeared on YouTube on July 26, 2012 by a German man who claimed he had received the video from an elected member of the Norwegian Progress Party. A Norwegian man had originally posted the recording on YouTube on June 27, according to the Norwegian news media. The man told media he didn’t know he was breaking the law and removed the video, but not before many people saw Breivik speaking in his own defense.
The trial had gone on for more than a month. At one time or another, everyone, even the officers of the court, including Judge Arntzen herself, had shed their share of tears. Everyone, that is, except the defendant. He seemed to be quite pleased with the process, as it continued to advance toward the closing arguments. “Unlivable injustice,” he had claimed as a motive and rationale. But as the trial progressed and came to an end, one question remained: unlivable justice for whom?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SENTENCE:
21 YEARS FOR 77 DEATHS
Was Sitting Bull a terrorist because he fought for the indigenous rights of his people[,] or was he a hero? That is the question that you will decide during this trial.
—ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO
Four months after Anders Breivik’s trial had begun, a panel consisting of five judges ruled him sane. This meant that he would serve his sentence in a regular prison, not in a mental institution where, in his mind, he would be considered a monster, a beast never again to see a day of freedom. He even got a break he hadn’t counted on. Instead of having to serve his sentence in Ringerike, a prison located about twenty-five miles northwest of Oslo, reserved for Norway’s most hard-core criminals, Breivik would be sent to Ila Prison, only about ten miles outside the capital. Many of Ila’s inmate population required maximum security, but its reputation as being “cushy” and more dedicated to rehabilitation than punishment dismayed those wanting Breivik to suffer for his crimes.
Most of the public, their very souls still torn by the tragedy, took the verdict as paradoxical. Many concerned citizens thought it would be better to send Breivik to prison than to place him in a mental institution where he could be deemed cured at any time. Most of all, they wanted him to be held responsible for his slaughter. But would Norway’s lenient approach to its penal system allow a convict of Breivik’s notoriety too many advantages? Would the country’s maximum sentence be enough penance for a man whose constant threats indicated that he had wished to kill more? After all, he could be released in 2033, at the age of fifty-three. The reaction to Breivik’s age, if released, stirred immediate protest from the liberal idealists who believed he should, after serving his prison term, be set free as a changed and rehabilitated man. After all, they argued, this is how the system is supposed to work. The goal with prison is not punishment but rehabilitation. A law professor at the University of Oslo, Mads Andenæs, agreed with Bård Solvik in that the goal was to return a rehabilitated Breivik back onto the streets one day if he were no longer considered dangerous. Solvik claimed that those who believed Breivik would never be liberated were wrong. Insisting, as others had done in an attempt to calm the public’s worries, Solvik said the purpose of such claims was “either to conceal to the people what kind of system we have, or to undermine the system.”
Many people, on the other hand, thought the killer should be silenced forever. In various articles and social media posts, others warned that Breivik should not be able to participate in intra- or inter-prison networks, where he could spread his anti-cultural, right-wing views through an underground criminal system that both the left and the right believed existed worldwide.
The survivors, the bereaved family members, and those just generally outraged by the bombing and shootings, would now know that the perpetrator of these crimes would be put away. But in that packed courtroom, when the verdict was announced, those injured and interested parties had plainly witnessed the smile on Breivik’s face as he watched them hug one another in their rather pathetic celebration.
When does Norway not want to see a murderer back on the street? Breivik’s case isn’t one of car theft or breaking into a bank. It is mass murder. The last time Norway had such a disaster was World War II, and the traitors and war criminals were executed by a firing squad. Norway demonstrated with Breivik that it knows no limit in any cases. In that country, rehabilitation is the only goal of incarceration. One wonders how the Norwegian government would handle another Hitler today. How many
people must one kill to warrant life in prison? What type of message does Breivik’s treatment send others who may be contemplating similar crimes?
NORWAY’S SOFT-TOUCH APPROACH
“Too weak a judgment upon the worst killer in Scandinavian history,” many who had followed the trial reported. The United States, considered by many abroad to be a land with a cruelly punitive criminal-justice system, voiced its outrage at the sentencing. Media from across the world questioned Norway’s soft-touch approach. Had the rights of the accused outweighed those of the victims? One could almost hear the echo of Breivik’s rants about the “deconstruction of Norway at the hands of cultural Marxists,” his anti-Muslim lectures, and his anti-multiculturalist views, all of which he had given after entering the courtroom with his arm straight out in a fascist salute.
In the modern age of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, one blogger summed up the outrage of many citizens around the globe. His calculations made the argument that Breivik would serve less than four months for each death. Where was the justice in such a sentence? Not only would Breivik’s taunts and rants live on, but the vision of his arrogance would remain indelible in the minds of millions of people. Breivik’s guilt, neither doubted nor disputed, hadn’t seemed the issue at any point, and clearly he would be considered sane. And now the world would have to live with that fact.
As days passed, order replaced chaos, and even the most disenchanted appeared to wilt a bit and see the verdict as fair punishment.
“Now we can have peace and quiet,” Per Balch Sørensen, whose daughter was killed in the Utøya shootings, told the Associated Press. Sørensen no longer felt any personal rancor toward the accused. “He (Breivik) doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “He is just air.” This was his attempt to invalidate Breivik and his political views.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 19
