Supreme Court Judgments on Criminal Responsibility: A Critical Review
A new article by Linda Gr枚ning 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.
Main content
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, Gr枚ning and Melle question the Supreme Court鈥檚 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.
Gr枚ning and Melle believe that the Supreme Court鈥檚 clarifications are limited and call for a more comprehensive assessment of functional failure beyond diagnostic boundaries.
鈥淥verall, the judgments leave, in our opinion, several unanswered questions about how the rules of criminal responsibility should be understood and delimited,鈥� says Gr枚ning.
The entire article can be read in the journal聽聽(in Norwegian).
