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Assange: Fair Trial in Sweden?

Fair trial for anyone?

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Christer van der Kwast, Claes Borgström, Seppo Penttinen, Birgitta Ståhle, Lars Lidberg, Sven-Åke Christiansson, Per Holck, Gubb Jan Stigson: who are these people and why are they relevant today?

They're involved in another of the big dirty judicial scandals in Sweden being unraveled at time of writing. They're all involved in the fabricated cases against Thomas Quick.

Thomas Quick was a guest of one of Sweden's mental institutions and a notorious pathological liar. He was scheduled for release. And after a life of being 'institutionalised', Quick wasn't happy about being set out on his own. So he started a macabre plan: admit to a number of unsolved murder mysteries in Sweden. He knew that his only punishment would be to be sent back to precisely the mental institution he'd just left - which is precisely what he wanted. Said and done.

Quick managed to get himself convicted of seven murders over a period of eight years in the Swedish court system. There never was any proof - no witnesses, no forensic evidence. Quick admitted to murdering other people as well - but many of those people turned out to either not exist or to be in the prime of health.

Christer van der Kwast was the state prosecutor in the Quick cases. He also made himself chief of the police investigations. He can be seen in photographs walking with Claes Borgström who was called in as defence attorney when the original attorney resigned in protest against the miscarriages of justice.

Claes Borgström never made waves like his more ethical predecessor. He picked up his sweet paychecks and kept his mouth shut. And he rarely if ever had any private consultations with his client. Mostly he'd meet right before a court hearing and talk for a minute about family and the weather. He did nothing for his client.

Seppo Penttinen was a policeman involved in the preliminary investigations. He's been found to have unilaterally fabricated evidence to make Christer van der Kwast's charges stick. He's also been found to have perjured himself.

Birgitta Ståhle is the 'quack' who was called in to study Quick's inner mind, summon up repressed memories of sexual abuse by Quick's parents and even their murder of Quick's younger brother Simon who was later found to have never existed. Yet her findings, methods, and testimony were never called into question.

Lars Lidberg and Sven-Åke Christiansson are professors of psychology who in the context of those Quick cases can't be called anything but idiots. They took the 'findings' of Birgitta Ståhle with her tale of the murder of someone who never existed and tried to show the court how such a murder could explain Quick's behaviour. This explanation was accepted by the courts.

Per Holck is another professor in the 'idiot league' called in to identify 0.5 grams of what was suspected to be human bone. One half gram. It was later found out to be not human bone or bone of any sort but a concoction of glue and plastic. Yet Per Holck went on the court records to claim he verified it was not only human bone but bone from a human 'between 5 and 15 years of age' - something the courts coincidentally wanted to hear for the Quick cases.

Gubb Jan Stigson is the journalist who wrote between 300 and 400 articles all full of sensationalistic and fabricated tripe in the best National Enquirer tradition about murders that never happened.

And Hannes Råstam? Råstam's the investigative journalist at SVT who dug into the Quick scandal and outed all the above individuals in a series of televised documentaries that resulted in the former seven convictions now being overturned one by one. The first two have already been taken care of; the remaining five are waiting their day.

Pots & Kettles

None of the 'culprits' in the Quick scandal have been chastised or punished in any way. But Hannes Råstam got into trouble: his third documentary was cited by the review board as being less than 'objective'. Why? Råstam evidently reported that the district court in Piteå wrote in their verdict:

'What's important in the Quick case is that Quick has been abused by both his father and his mother.'

The quote is correct and is also a vital part of the motivation for convicting Quick despite the total lack of witnesses or evidence - something that's rather common in Sweden but 100% unacceptable in any other country. Why did the review board object?

The review board pointed out that the court in Piteå were only quoting one of the idiot professors who'd said so. The board held that Råstam failed the objectivity test by not making it more clear that the court were only citing someone else and not formulating those actual words themselves.

Imagine making a three hour documentary and getting every fact 100% right save in a single case where something of minor importance could be misconstrued. Any journalist anywhere would fight for such an achievement. Swedish journalist Jan Guillou says he's read numerous reviews and even been criticised himself for his own work - and he's never seen such an indefensible motivation for criticism.

'The nicest thing you can say about it is that it's splitting hairs. And so they succeeded in condemning one of the best efforts in investigative journalism ever shown on Swedish television. The powers that be can at times generate enormous energy and intellectual activity to attack someone. But why in such case have all the real culprits behind the Thomas Quick scandal not been condemned?'

Why indeed.

A recurring discussion in the world right now is whether Julian Assange could possibly get a fair trial in Sweden. But that topic completely misses the point - for when you take into account the frightening level of false rape accusations and convictions in Sweden, the use of totally uneducated political appointees to the courts to render these idiot verdicts, the infamous da Costa case, the 'cult case' that became the start of the maniac Eva Lundgren's work for so many years, and when you look at the horrific Quick scandal, you have to ask if anyone's ever got a fair trial there.