I have seen many posts about the murder in Hjallerup and the sentence. About deportation, custody, the price of storage.
I stand somewhere else.
Because there is a detail in that case I cannot get past. It is not the cobblestone that was used to smash and crush her head, it is not the throat, it is not the trousers.
It is the cola can he comes back with afterwards - that small, everyday gesture, the one that tells you this is not a person who has stumbled into a nightmare and cannot find his way out, but a person who has done it, looked at it, left the scene, and returned to pour something sticky over what he himself left behind.
And then he goes home and participates in the search.
That is where the picture breaks. That is where everyone should understand that this is not a breakdown. It is a choice, considered, and chosen again.
From here begin conversations in comment threads about how the debt cannot only go one way. That he should be deported. That the guest who smashes the host's furniture does not remain. And none of that is racism, those are the most ordinary house rules everywhere in the world, and virtually every other country has them. That we do not have them is a Danish peculiarity - a self-understanding price we pay with other people's children.
But I cannot stop at that question.
This goes much deeper.
Because the question of where he should sleep for the next twelve years is not the hardest question here. The hardest is another. And we dare not ask it, because we have decided in advance that it is barbaric, before we have considered it.
There is a reason the classical West for two thousand years contained the death penalty as a possibility the court could reach for. Not as revenge. Not as deterrence - because it works so-so - but as testimony. As a framework that said a human life cannot be balanced with years and administration, because man is created in God's image, and murder is therefore an assault on something greater than the victim alone. Therefore it required a proportional answer. Not because Man was cheap. Because he was infinitely precious.
Modernity has reversed the sign. We say we have abolished the death penalty because we have higher respect for human life. Pat ourselves on the shoulder and feel good. It is a comfortable sentence. But it is also untrue. We have abolished it because we no longer dare to believe that anything is absolute - that there exist actions so total that they call for a correspondingly absolute answer.
We have not gained more reverence for life. We have gained less.
Ask a modern humanist which action would call for an absolute answer. Where lies that boundary modernity claims to defend? Hear the silence. It is not because the answer is too difficult. It is because the category is gone.
And we still have the dead girl behind the district heating plant.
He crushed her head with paving stones. He stepped on her throat. He raped her. He returned with cola. He participated in the search. There is nothing in that sequence you can call a person who has lost himself and needs to be helped back. This is a person who has found himself, there in that moment, and acted consistently from it. It is worse than madness. Madness we can have mercy for. This is a direction.
And the direction continues. The Forensic Medical Council said it themselves. Unreliable. Manipulative. Great danger to others' lives. So we have a person who has demonstrated what he is capable of, and a professional assessment that he will be the same afterwards. And we have decided that this must not lead to anything other than twelve years and a clear path.
Forgiveness does not belong here. Forgiveness is an inner movement that Anna's parents may someday, for their own sake, find their way into - so Shegow does not also take their hearts. That is their matter. No one can do it for them, and no one has the right to demand it of them.
But the court is not the parents. The court is civilization's scales. And when the scales no longer dare to hold a human life up against the action that extinguished it, then the scales have broken. Then there is no longer a court. Then there is an administration.
Therefore my answer on sentencing probably goes further than yours.
Of course he should not be deported.
He should go straight to the exit.
As I wrote yesterday and now explain.
Not because I want to see anyone die. But because Imago Dei cuts both ways. It is not only a shield over the criminal. It is also a sword over the crime. When a person has done violence to that image, so totally, so consistently, so without remorse - then he has not only offended against Anna. He has offended against the order that makes humans sacred at all. And that order has the right to answer.
His business with God is his own. It is not suspended by a sentence, not even if the sentence is final. The thief on the cross was forgiven and did not come down from the cross. The one room does not cancel the other. It never has.
But he also has business with us. And our answer should not be twelve years in a cell he comes out of strengthened, into a society where Anna's friends are now young women. Our answer should be that here runs the boundary. The last boundary. The one that cannot be negotiated. The one that does not cost multimillions per year to maintain with custody and treatment. It is not a risk we take with open eyes. It is a consequence we have chosen in advance and signed off on.
As long as the evidence leaves no shadow of doubt. As long as civilization's scales truly hold. As long as it is not revenge disguised as procedure.
But there, where Imago Dei has been crushed with a paving stone in a field in Hjallerup, there society must answer with the same gravity as the crime.
Everything else is a humanism that has forgotten why Man was sacred in the first place.
❤️🔥🪽
