Supreme Court Judgments on Criminal Responsibility: A Critical Review
A new article by Linda Gröning and Karl Heinrik Melle discusses the first judgments from the Norwegian Supreme Court on the rules of criminal responsibility after the law amendment in 2020.
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The article is based on work in the research project DIMENSIONS, and discusses HR-2023-1242-A and HR-2023-1243-A. Both judgments concern the question of criminal responsibility due to a severely deviant mental state.
In the article, Gröning and Melle question the Supreme Court’s emphasis on planning as a premise for criminal responsibility, and also problematize that ICD-10 diagnoses still seem to have a significant impact on the assessment of criminal responsibility.
Gröning and Melle believe that the Supreme Court’s clarifications are limited and call for a more comprehensive assessment of functional failure beyond diagnostic boundaries.
“Overall, the judgments leave, in our opinion, several unanswered questions about how the rules of criminal responsibility should be understood and delimited,” says Gröning.
The entire article can be read in the journal Jussens Venner (in Norwegian).
