The Court of Appeal over Skåne and Blekinge lists aggravating circumstances in its life sentence against the 18-year-old man who murdered two teachers at Malmö Latin School in March this year.
The student intended to kill someone at the school, the attacks were unprovoked, it happened after a certain planning and the teachers were at their workplace, the court writes. The violence was extensive, brutal and mindless. One of the teachers is also said to have been subjected to two separate attacks.
“It has been a question of pure executions,” the court writes in its judgment.
“Assess the crimes separately”
The only mitigating circumstance that the court emphasizes is that the 18-year-old, who has been diagnosed with autism, has a lack of development and judgment compared to other peers.
— All in all, there are too many aggravating circumstances compared to mitigating circumstances. So it must be a prison sentence of over 16 years, which is otherwise normal for murder, if there are no aggravating or mitigating circumstances, says Christoffer Wong, lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Lund University.
However, Wong believes that the Court of Appeal does not make a sufficient individual assessment of each murder.
“Actually, the crimes must be assessed individually and what the penalty value is for each crime, even if they are very similar. It is legally a bit questionable, he says.
Whether each individual murder carries up to life imprisonment or whether it should be a time-limited sentence makes the case a matter for the Supreme Court, Wong believes.
“There, the Court of Appeal has made an assessment and different judges can make different assessments,” says Christoffer Wong.
On the other hand, Wong believes that the defense – in the event of an appeal – will not be granted leave to appeal in HD if you only focus on the Court of Appeal’s reasoning about the 18-year-old’s degree of maturity.
“Not a matter of law”
— If it’s just that point, I don’t think HD will grant leave to appeal. Precisely on that point, the Court of Appeal has made an assessment and reached a conclusion. Permission to appeal is not usually given for such questions.
After the district court verdict, Christoffer Wong considered that the court did not reason in sufficient detail about whether the defendant’s actions have been affected by a lack of development, experience or judgment.
— It is done in more detail and carefully in the Court of Appeal. That is what you can ask of the Court of Appeal. The defense may not agree with the conclusion, but the court has gone through its reasoning. Then one can assume that it has been tried in two instances and the interest in trying it again in HD is not that high, because it is not a question of law, says Christoffer Wong.