In a spectacular failure of the legal process that would make a whirling dervish look decisive, the trial of accused Norwegian hitman Mikael ‘The Snowplow’ Bjornstad has collapsed into a hung jury, leaving six men and six women locked in a room with nothing but a half-eaten packet of digestives and twenty-three days of contradictory evidence. The accused, a former ski instructor with the dead-eyed stare of a man who has seen too many IKEA flatpacks, stands accused of dispatching three rival crime bosses via methods ranging from the classical (blunt instrument) to the baroque (poisoned lutefisk). But the jury, poor souls, have been sent home with the legal equivalent of a shrug.
Their foreman, a man who clearly has not slept since the Crimean War, announced to a hushed courtroom that they were ‘nowhere near a unanimous decision,’ a phrase that hung in the air like a bad smell in a lift. The judge, a woman whose patience appeared to have been soaked in aquavit, had little choice but to declare a mistrial. This, my friends, is the great engine of justice we have built: a machine so convoluted that it can churn for months only to produce a damp squib and a legal bill the size of a small fjord.
The prosecution, draped in expensive suits that did little to hide their despair, said they would ‘consider their options.’ The defence, a man who looked like he had just won the lottery, smiled like a fox that had found the henhouse keys and eaten the guard dog. And Bjornstad?
He sat there, impassive, a man whose soul appeared to have been replaced with a block of Jarlsberg. The trial boiled down to the reliability of a key witness, a former associate with the moral compass of a hungry weasel, and a piece of forensic ‘evidence’ that turned out to be a rubber spatula. The jury, clearly unable to distinguish between reasonable doubt and a psychedelic nightmare, threw up their hands.
So now we have a hitman, possibly guilty, certainly dangerous, wandering the streets of Oslo because twelve good people and true couldn’t agree on whether he was a professional killer or just a very unlucky ski bum. It is a perfect metaphor for modern justice: expensive, interminable, and ultimately as satisfying as a slap with a wet fish. The retrial, should it happen, will cost another fortune and achieve precisely the same result.
And somewhere, in a bar in the shadow of the courthouse, Bjornstad is probably ordering a shot of Linie Aquavit with a knowing smirk. Cheers, justice. You’ve done it again.
