Yesterday Norwegian mass murderer and bomber Anders Behring Breivik finally got his dom (verdict): 21 years of prison, which is the maximum straff (punishment) you can get at a Norwegian rett (court).

Only 21 years for killing 77 mennesker (humans, human beings)?? This seems to be the common outcry in the internet. I know that a lot of Americans, in particular, have a hard time understanding the verdict. Have the Norwegian dommere (judges) lost their mind?

It all boils down to very different ideas of how a crime should be punished. For example, when bin Laden was killed, many people in the US celebrated that justice, as they saw it, had been done. Many Europeans, on the other hand, thought that the killing was wrong. Most European countries have abolished dødsstraff (capital punishment), and in Scandinavia a lot of people think that no matter how terrible crimes a person has committed, he or she still has the right to be alive. (If the Norwegian government ordered that Breivik be shot, for example, most Norwegians would think that they were just as criminal as Breivik. The fact that Breivik killed others, does not, according to this view, give others the right to kill him.)

In fact, during most of the trial, some prosecutors said that Breivik should not go to prison at all: They argued that he was mentally ill, and that he should rather be forced to undergo psychiatric treatment. (A mentally ill person cannot be held responsible for crimes in Norway.) In the end, though, the judges sided with those psychiatrists who said Breivik was not insane.

Nevertheless, an atrocity like Breivik’s has never been seen in Norway before, and many Norwegians would sure like him to be gone from the surface of the earth. (Such as the young man who recently tried to throw a sko, shoe, at Breivik.) For all those people, it might be a trøst (consolation) to know that Breivik will most probably never get out of the fengsel (jail): His total imprisonment can be prolonged by five years if the authorities still consider him a threat to society by then, and after that, another five years can be added, etc.

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has published an interactive ”word cloud” where Norwegians can vent their feelings after the verdict. Some of the most clicked words are:

medielei  tired of the media
lettet  relieved
ferdig  done, exhausted
likegyldig  indifferent
ambivalent  ambiguous
tilfreds  satisfied
fornøyd  pleased
oppgitt  frustrated
beroliget  reassured
overrasket  surprised