At 1pm on Friday, Attorney General Jørn Sigurd Maurud told that he will ask that Viggo Kristiansen be acquitted in the Baneheia case. Maurud made it clear that the overall investigative material does not provide any grounds for criminal prosecution against Kristiansen, and that he must therefore be considered innocent of the two rapes and murders for which he was convicted in 2001. The Attorney General also asked Viggo Kristiansen to apologize for the injustice committed against him. The Attorney General’s recommendation cannot be called anything other than a blanket acquittal of Kristiansen. At the same time, it delivers a crushing verdict on the evidence assessments that have been made through two court proceedings of the Baneheia case, and through the Re-examination Commission’s assessments of four previous petitions to have Kristiansen’s case reopened. The rule of law in Norway must examine itself to find out how this could happen, and the Minister of Justice has already announced that a committee will be set up to do this. It is therefore the rule of law that has failed Viggo Kristiansen. But at news we must also ask ourselves the question of why we have not done more over the years to carry out our own, critical investigations of the evidence in the case. Much of the material that forms the basis of the attorney general’s conclusion in the case today was already on the table in 2010. news has editorially covered all rounds of the Re-admission Commission, but we have to a very small extent problematized the commission’s rejection of the case. news’s ethics editor Per Arne Kalbakk. Photo: news During the years that have passed since 2008-09, news and documentary journalists at news have on several occasions gone through new documentation and other material from the case to assess the possibilities of creating their own, investigative journalism on this. But until the case was actually reopened last year, the conclusion was each time that we had too little to proceed with the cases. New documentation was not perceived as concrete enough, or it seemed difficult to find sources that could strengthen the defenders’ version of the evidence. With the summary in hand, it is easy to see that we did not do enough to investigate the matter. How could this happen? Several of the journalists who have worked on the case over the years have been highly involved in exposing other legal scandals in Norway, and they would hardly put the investigations aside if they thought they could do the same in this case. One factor that has come into play has probably been an element of editorial touch anxiety. The Baneheia case was one of the most cruel criminal cases in recent times – two girls aged 8 and 10 were brutally raped and killed while they were on a swimming trip in what was supposed to be a safe environment in the local area of Kristiansand. Many journalists and editors have been reluctant to impose the additional burden we knew would be on the girls’ families if we put the matter on the agenda again. A consequence of this has been that we have unfortunately asked more critical questions about why the lawyers have constantly demanded that the case be reopened than we have asked critical questions about the fact that there has never actually been any evidence linking Viggo Kristiansen to the crime scene – quite the contrary, as we now know. But the most important reason why news has done too bad a job with the Baneheia case is probably as simple as it is journalistically embarrassing: We have believed that the verdict in the Baneheia case is correct. Many journalists and editors at news have assessed the case independently over the years, but we have all carried with us the strong memories of the trials around the turn of the millennium and the very clear judgments that were handed down at the time. The re-admission commission’s repeated, blunt rejections of the previous demands for reopening contributed enough to reinforce the established impression of the case. This is in many ways understandable, but from a journalistic perspective it is far from good enough. We should have done more to carry out independent, investigative journalism about the evidence in the Baneheia case – and if we didn’t do it before, it should at least have happened after Bjørn Olav Jahr published his documentary book in 2017 about all the weaknesses in the evidence which meant that Viggo Kristiansen unjustly had to spend so many years of his life in prison. That time in 2017, we let Jahr into news’s studios and columns, but we did little to proceed with our own investigations of the startling discoveries he had made. Here, news’s editors and journalists failed our responsibility to “uncover neglect and abuse of individuals and groups from public authorities and institutions”, as stated in one of the most central points in the press’s ethical guidelines (Be careful poster). Today we must regret that in this way we have failed our task in the Baneheia case, and we must learn from what has happened in this case in order to reduce the risk that similar mistakes can happen again. We must be careful when working on cases that can tear up painful wounds for those involved, but we must never shy away from examining cases with a critical eye. The rule of law can be wrong, even when it seems completely certain of its case.
ttn-69
news has also failed in the Baneheia case – Statement
