It did not take many minutes in courtroom 14 in the courthouse in Haugesund before the defenders put their demand on the table: The 52-year-old defendant must be acquitted of the murder of Birgitte Tengs. The claim was in sharp contrast to the prosecution’s demand for 17 years in prison for the defendant. Now it is up to the court to decide the case. And it will not be an easy task. The DNA evidence is still central. But in addition, the parties’ proceedings dealt a lot with the defendant’s modus operandi. In other words, whether he can be suspected because of his past behavior. And here the court heard two completely different versions. The prosecution believes that the defendant fits a perpetrator profile, and that this is fully consistent with a murderer. In particular, they refer to the 52-year-old’s extensive history of violent and immoral crimes. The public prosecutors attach particular importance to two matters: the bicycle pump violence against an adult woman when the defendant was only 15 years old, and the attack against his psychologist four years later. The prosecution believes that these incidents show that he is capable of committing serious violence. “He has low impulse control, reacts to the rejection of women, and can completely lose his temper,” state prosecutor Thale Thomseth said in court on Tuesday. And there was more to come: “The prosecution’s claim is that the defendant was in a bad life situation in the spring of 1995. He lived at home in the boys’ room, and was lonely and lonely. He spent much of his time driving around and picking up hitchhiking girls. Several of them experienced sexual advances from the defendant,” continued Thomseth. She also pointed out that the defendant has confessed to being behind between five and ten cases of exposure. “He was not deterred by the reactions he received. The crime is related to his need to vent his sexual fantasies and needs that he is unable to control,” concluded the public prosecutor. The picture became quite different when the defenders got the floor for proceedings on Wednesday. Lawyer Stian Kristensen vigorously countered the prosecution’s claims. He believes that the prosecution is spending time on the 52-year-old’s background to portray him as an outcast, and in that way get the court to lower the threshold for conviction. “It is completely irrelevant to the matter if he gets turned on by dressing in women’s clothes,” began the defender. Furthermore, he argued that the defendant’s modus operandi does not fit into the murder case. “Is it his modus operandi to commit a sexually motivated premeditated murder of an unknown girl? In sum, I would claim that the conditions for which he has been convicted completely and consistently show the opposite. Namely that he is a coward in his approaches to girls”, concluded Kristensen. “It is difficult to understand that he should have managed to keep the ‘predator’ in check all these years. We clearly believe that these conclusions cannot be drawn”, summarized the lawyer. The court has thus heard two completely different interpretations of the defendant’s past. The prosecution uses the criminal history as an argument that the defendant was capable of committing murder and assault. The defenders, for their part, believe that his background is irrelevant to the murder case because, in their opinion, he has not been convicted of anything close to what Birgitte Tengs was exposed to. It will be interesting to see how the court assesses this, and what weight the judges place on the 52-year-old’s background. It is a general opinion that the DNA discovery is still the main evidence in the case. The court must still find it proven that the defendant’s DNA ended up on the 17-year-old’s pantyhose during the act of murder itself. If there is any doubt about this, the rest of the case crumbles away. But if the court finds the DNA evidence certain enough, the mode can be used to build up the question of guilt. It may also have something to say about sentencing. The prosecutor’s office stated on Tuesday that they would have applied for a custodial sentence if the murder had happened more recently. But now the state prosecutors believe that the conditions for detention are no longer present. There is no doubt, however, that the 52-year-old must count on many years in prison if he is convicted. The penalty for murder under particularly aggravating circumstances is 21 years. Case law dictates a deduction if a long time has passed since the offense occurred. Otherwise, there are few mitigating circumstances in the case. It is easy to agree with the prosecution that the traces at the crime scene bear witness to an exceptionally brutal act of murder. Birgitte was hit more than twenty times in the head with stones or other objects, subjected to abuse and dragged more than 40 meters into a bush. How long she was alive and what she got with her, no one knows. But there is little reason to doubt that she must have been terrified. With this as a backdrop, the court must now decide whether the right man is sitting on the dock. Only if the judges are absolutely sure can they sentence the 52-year-old. There has been much talk of doubt in the upcoming seven-week trial. If the court comes to the conclusion that this doubt is only theoretical, the way is cleared for conviction. If, on the other hand, the doubt is reasonable and reasonable, the court is obliged to acquit. We will get the answer at the end of February next year.
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Coward or murderer? – Speech
