Some Common Views

I now have no more comments to make here on Allmo's/Mollbeck's book. Therefore I shall no longer retain Allmo's real name but only her pseudonym.

It has very often been said that the defendant and the injured party are the only persons who know what has really taken place. Judges, jurors, police officers, psychiatrists, social workers etc. are outsiders, and as such they can do no more than believing one or the other party.

My analyses have conclusively refuted this view. Oswald's and Helena's innocence is fully proved in the scientific sense. And what is proved in the scientific sense is much more certain than what has in the legal sense been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".

Other statements also constitute firmly established scientific results. Elvira has never recalled any sexual assaults performed by her parents. Instead her pseudo-recollections were invented and indoctrinated by Mollbeck.

In almost all countries it is taken for granted that the verdict in legal trials should be based on ordinary lay thinking. And regardless of whether the verdict is made by jurors or judges, lay thinking is thought to be entirely appropriate and sufficient. I am not aware of any other exception than Sweden.

But ordinary lay thinking often means little else than subjective feeling. And such subjective feelings are often inspired by or even imitated from mass media.

Besides, a weeping girl can make a strong impression. Oswald was an amateur actor. He had a special theatre ointment that would enable anyone to weep for a very long time. Elvira had stolen that ointment and applied it when she testified in court. - I cannot imagine any judge who would permit the defence to soak up a specimen of Elvira's tears on a handkerchief and send it off to a laboratory.

When judges (instead of jurors) are responsible for the verdict, the received theory of verdict making is based on the following assumptions. Judges will correctly perceive all pieces of evidence that has been presented by the parties during the proceedings. They will correctly recall them. They will attach the proper evidential value to each individual piece of evidence. As a consequence their only remaining task is to weigh together these evidential values.

I apologise for the necessity of wasting space on the pseudo-proof that Oswald during the proceedings denied having been alone with Elvira in her room. During the police interrogation he said the same thing as Elvira, viz. that he did not recall any event of the kind.

When the new trial took place, he had served two years of a 10-year-sentence. In prison he had been physically attacked by other prisoners. He was exposed to one attempted murder. In contrast to the other prisoners he was locked in his cell, not as a punishment, but in order to prevent severe injury or murder. He was systematically treated with contempt by the staff and, especially, by the psychiatric therapists. And during the new trial it was apparent to anyone (including Oswald himself) that the court had in advance decided to re-convict him.

Against this background it would be absurd to request that he should recall every trivial detail. He did not even have a defence counsel, except in a purely formal sense. This is the only case where I have seen a defence counsel who did not spend the recesses together with his client. I know for certain that this formally appointed defence counsel believed that Oswald had really murdered many people. Hence, he thought, Oswald should count himself lucky if he only got a 10-year-sentence for sexual abuse.

Oswald strongly requested the counsel to call certain important witnesses. The counsel promised to do so, but did not do it at all.

There was no one to warn Oswald against denying that some trivial events had happened, just because he did not recall them.

In Sweden there are two new case-laws by the Supreme Court, according to which the defendant had the right to a defence counsel in whom he has confidence. If a defendant has completely lost his confidence in a certain defence counsel, he has the right to a new counsel. - Hence, when the five judges refused him to change his counsel, they knowingly acted against the Swedish law.

As I mentioned in chapter 47, the re-opened Södertälje case started about one month after the Umeå case was finished. The judges of the court of appeal in Stockholm may have realised that the general public would lose confidence in the legal system, if the very same kind miscarriage of justice turned out to have been committed by two district courts and two courts of appeal almost at the same time.

Those facts that were really testified by the mother - and correctly stated by the judges on p. 22 of the judgement - had zero evidential power in support of the charge. In other words, these five judges were not capable of evaluating this part of the evidence.

A very important question is whether we can be sure that the judges first experienced the perceptual or mnemonic distortion, and afterwards based the evidential value on this distortion Couldn't the opposite pattern be true instead Maybe the judges first felt an emotional need for attaching a strong evidential powers to the alone-together-events - and maybe this need afterwards led to the distortion of their perception and recollection



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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida