The Court of Appeal hearing after the murder of Tove in Vetlanda is scheduled for the end of August. Now it is reported that the prosecutor has submitted new evidence that questions 18-year-old Maja Hellman’s story. Leif GW Persson is critical of the new information that the prosecutor claims to have.
– I think he got that bit on the back foot, he says.
The new evidence that prosecutor Adam Rullman intends to present in the Göta Court of Appeal concerns a deposition that he believes calls into question Maja Hellman’s story about the night Tove was murdered. Maja Hellman herself has said that she was asleep when Tove died, and her former defender has claimed that 20-year-old Johanna Leshem Jansson hid the body in the storage room in question.
However, Adam Rullman believes that they must have murdered Tove together. He goes by the forensic experts’ assessment that there was never a body in the warehouse. But according to Leif GW Persson, the prosecutor draws the wrong conclusions.
– I think he got that bit on the back foot. On the one hand, it is irrelevant in relation to what determines the actual question of guilt in the murder part, and on the other hand, I think, when it comes to the part in her story that she would have seen the body only when it was lying on a sheet out in the hall, there is no need to be true – either because she’s got things on the back foot or because she speaks against better knowledge, he says.
“Unnecessarily fussing over it”
GW believes that the prosecutor has decided to try to sentence the two women to as serious a crime and as long a prison sentence as possible in the Court of Appeal, and that he is therefore now keen to question Maja Hellman’s credibility.
– It seems that he wants to win this regardless of the price.
But a prosecutor who wins a case is not the one who hands out the longest prison sentence. A winning prosecutor is the one who gets as close to the truth as possible, says Leif GW Persson.
– The prosecutor is charged with a duty of objectivity, but now he has these blinders in front of his eyes so he doesn’t see the obvious. He complicates it unnecessarily.
Unclear how the outcome will be
We’ll see if the outcome is different in August when the case is taken up in the Göta Court of Appeal. Leif GW Persson believes, however, that both Maja Hellman and Johanna Leshem Jansson would have been acquitted if the case had been tried in another court of appeal.
– I’m not that familiar with how legal you are in the Göta Court of Appeal. Had it been in the Court of Appeal for Western Sweden, or in the Svea Court of Appeal, I would have been fairly certain that both would have been acquitted in the murder part.
Why?
– I do not have sufficient statistical data, but there is considerable variation in the degree to which aspects of legal certainty are taken into account between different courts of appeal.