Anders Breivik Prosecutors Seek Psychiatric Confinement
Norwegian prosecutors asked a trial court in Oslo on Thursday to order Anders Behring Breivik, who has admitted killing 77 people, confined for compulsory psychiatric treatment instead of sentencing him to prison.
Almost ten weeks of testimony in the trial of Mr. Breivik, 33, showed that he was psychotic at the time of the killings last July, the prosecutors argued. And while there is some doubt about whether he is legally sane now, that doubt requires that he be hospitalized rather than imprisoned, they said.
“In our opinion, it is worse that a psychotic person is sentenced to preventative detention than a nonpsychotic person is sentenced to compulsory mental health care,” Svein Holden, one of the prosecutors, told the court.
Mr. Breivik has acknowledged planting a bomb in central Oslo on July 22, 2011, that exploded, killing 8 people, and then traveling the same day to the island of Utoya, where he shot 69 people, mostly teenagers, belonging to the youth wing of the ruling Labour Party. He has insisted that he was and is sane; that he killed in self-defense, carrying out what he called his “operation” to combat the “Islamic colonization” of Europe; and that an insanity judgment would detract from his cause.