Posted on 07/08/2004 3:17:12 AM PDT by ScaniaBoy
Mijailovic has "significant psychiatric problems"
An appeals court in Sweden has thrown out the life prison sentence imposed on the man who killed the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh last year.
Mijailo Mijailovic will now be taken from prison to a closed psychiatric ward after tests concluded he was suffering a mental illness.
An initial psychiatric assessment after his arrest concluded he was not mentally ill when he killed Miss Lindh.
Miss Lindh was a hugely popular minister and her death shocked Sweden.
Murder conviction upheld
She died of her injuries on 11 September last year, a day after Mijailovic stabbed her while she was out shopping in a Stockholm department store.
The appeals court said Mijailovic, 25, needed psychiatric care because he was a "traumatised person with significant psychiatric problems".
The court did uphold the guilty verdict against Mijailovic for murdering Miss Lindh.
His defence had sought the lesser charge of manslaughter, arguing Mijailovic had not intended to kill the politician.
But the court ruled: "It has been proven that Mijailo Mijailovic was completely indifferent as to whether Anna Lindh would die of her stab wounds and he therefore had intent to kill."
Miss Lindh had been tipped as a future prime minister.
Her death stunned a nation which had still not come to terms with the unsolved killing of the-then prime minister, Olaf Palme, back in 1986.
Good grief, liberalism should be added to the catalogue of psychiatric diseases.
Seriously, I don't think that we have the moral authority to critique the Swedish criminal justice system-though I reserve the exclusive right to critique each and every aspect of Swedish life, with the sole exception of their really hot blonds-when we have are own Mijhailovic in the United States.
Anyone remember a untreated-by his own instructions, mind you-lunatic named 'Rusty' Weston?
I did enjoy the court's reasoning in upholding part of this murderer's sentence, i.e. they weren't positive that he hadn't intended to actually kill her after he had stabbed her.
And here I was, thinking that the only possible reason you would want to stab someone is to kill them.
Then again, those gun control laws are awfully stringent in Western Europe, so I suppose the assassins there have very little recourse, other than stabbing their helpless victims.
On an unrelated side-note, this woman was one of the most antisemitic, pro-Euro, i.e. pro-fascist, politicians on the Continent.
Not that those execrable positions mitigate this heinous act of terrorism; I simply want to point out that Anna Lindh was not beloved by all.
This time I think the court made the correct descision.
He will receive treatment, but it is unlikely that his time behind bars will be shorter than if he had been judged mentally competent. Actually it may be longer.
She certainly wasn't, not even in Sweden.
After the murder Sweden had a short "Diana moment", but it had passed even before the euro referendum 4 days later.
However, the whole "insanity" defense continues to rankle me on so many levels.
If the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk were a singular instance of this ridiculous b.s. job being used to evade the law, then I might grudgingly accept it.
However, when it has been used on countless occasions to free the mentally deranged and inherently violent, I'm thinking in particular, of the cases involving the hit-jobs on President Ronald Reagan and Congressman Roger Lowenstein, it starts to pose a mortal threat to our domestic tranquility as a nation.
As far as Lindh is concerned, I'm pretty sure she wasn't in the minority-unfortunately-in her opinions.
If you refer to length, then I agree, but in terms of "ease of sentence" it's huge. For example....doing 10 years of house arrest is quite easier than doing 10 years in a maximum security prison.
The length of time is the same, but it's hardly the same time. Am I making any sense?
Pete
"...the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk..."
Yeah, and poor Milk was (or became) a martyr of the gay "community" and still the libs support the rights of criminals over those belonging to the rest of us, gay or straight. I've always been surprised that Milk's murder did not do more to boost support for criminal justice amoung the lefties.
LOL.
It is a tragedy that her opinion and support of the attack on the Serbs cost her life.
IMO the perp should remain in jail for life.
It should NEVER be a crime to kill a communist in self-defense of your country.
However, I don't think that you'll see any real change in policy direction from the Democratic Party.
Once the radicals seized control of the party apparatus-first by staging an abortive coup d'etat in '68, and then, superseding the old-line party apparatchiks at the next Dem. convention-any sign of intelligent life on law & order issues was bound to be extinguished on sight.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
There are so many problems I have with our CJR that I couldn't possibly begin to enumerate them in this brief comment.
So, I'll just tick off a few of the most serious complaints among my litany of gripes regarding our system of justice:
1. Uninformed juries and insane jurists awarding huge compensatory and punitive damage awards respectively.
2. No effective check-thanks to the despicable K-Street culture of Congress-on the wayward courts, which are unraveling the U.S. Constitution one thread at a time.
And finally,
3.Venal, avaricious trial lawyers who are abusing our system of criminal and civil justice to fill their already flush coffers.
This is a travesty.
BTTT
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