I have spent the afternoon reading my way through the case of Christian Zedig from one end to the other.
I wanted to find the place where it went wrong.
I didn't find it.
The prosecutor did his job, he asked for 12 months and got it.
The judge did the same and even gave weight to the fact that the man has previously been convicted of rape, aggravated assault and an attempted killing with a knife that got him seven years.
The law was followed, and the law says that a single punch is simple assault, because a punch is typically not dangerous - and that is still what it is called when it breaks a vertebra in the neck and ruptures an artery, and the man dies three days later, leaving behind his wife and two daughters.
Simple assault.
So.
12 months.
That's it.
The table in the schedule was followed, because the last time someone died from a single blow it cost six months, and here they actually gave double. So it was a severe sentence.
Even the ban on going out on the town between midnight and five in the morning is by the book, even though the blow, mind you, fell at a quarter to nine in the evening in front of a big screen.
The law, as I read it, did admittedly have room for more - three years and half again on top for a man with that past, but nobody asked for it, because that's not how it's usually done.
Regardless.
Had they given him all of it, it would still be four and a half years for a Human Being. Two doors further down the corridor there is a section that goes up to twelve years when someone dies from the violence, and that door was locked, because a punch, as I wrote above - is typically not dangerous.
So every single link delivered exactly what it was built to deliver. There is no error to correct and no one to fire or demand answers from.
That is what I can't get past.
Because when a man with that record climbs up on a bench, throws beer cans into a crowd of people, walks over and hits a stranger in the throat and afterwards says in court "No, I just hit him" - and the answer from the rest of us is - "12 months" - then it is not because something has broken.
This is what it looks like when it works.
And I know the principle well. You are judged for what you intended, and he did not intend to kill. It is an old and good idea, and I don't want to be rid of it. But it is there for the one who didn't know better, and if anyone in this country knows how little a human being can take, it is a man who got seven years for putting a knife into another man's chest.
He has stood before a judge before.
He has been told what it costs.
He even says himself that there was no reason.
The man "was just in the way..."
We have an old image of Justice in our culture.
A woman with a blindfold over her eyes, a sword in one hand and a scale in the other, and the scale has two pans, because what a Human Being has done must be weighed against what it has cost. She is the one we have asked to measure, weigh and judge on our behalf.
So what did she put in the pans on Wednesday?
In one she put his intent, and there was almost nothing there, because he didn't want to kill, did he, he just wanted to hit. She weighed it as if he were a boy who happened to push too hard in the schoolyard and got just as frightened as everyone else when his friend didn't get up.
In the other she put a Human Being. A man of 32 who was somebody's son and somebody's husband and father to two girls, and who on a Tuesday evening went over the bridge to watch football. An image that existed only once, and which cannot be made again, neither by a court nor by anyone else.
And the scale barely moved. The pan that should have hit the floor with a crash stayed hanging up there, and when she read off the number, it said a few months.
Now they are angry at Christiansborg, the Danish parliament, and the Prime Minister says indignantly "that this simply won't do".
I politely remind you that it is eight months since the same people passed what they themselves called - "the biggest tightening of sentences in recent times". And they are the ones who wrote every line of the book that was followed here to the letter.
Christian's father has asked her to come to Småland and explain it to him face to face. I hope she goes up there. I just don't know what she will say, because there is nothing to explain.
Everything went as it should.
The system delivered everything it has promised.
The only thing it did not deliver was Justice.
❤️🔥🪽
