If the Norse sagas taught us anything, it is that no crime goes unavenged. Yet here we are, in the soft, bureaucratic twilight of modern Scandinavia, where a jury cannot even decide whether a self-described hitman is guilty. The trial of a Norwegian man accused of plotting a contract killing has ended in a hung jury, a mistrial that speaks volumes about the erosion of legal clarity in the West.
Let us recall that Norway was once a land of stark justice, where the feudal thing assemblies settled disputes with a finality that would make today’s legal scholars squirm. Now, we have endless deliberation, expert witnesses, and psychiatric evaluations, all culminating in a collective shrug. The accused, a man linked to a motorcycle gang, allegedly offered money for a murder. The intended victim is a former associate, a man who clearly knew too much or wronged the wrong person. The evidence: texts, meetings, a weapon recovered. But still, the jury could not agree.
This is not merely a judicial hiccup. It is a symptom of a deeper malady, what Edward Gibbon might call the ‘decline of decisive action’. The Roman Republic fell not when barbarians crossed the Rhine but when the Senate could no longer agree on what constituted treason. Our current legal systems, paralysed by procedural obsession and a fear of finality, are mirroring that same decadence. A hitman trial should be straightforward: either there was a plot, or there was not. Yet the jury, perhaps swayed by the postmodern notion that ‘truth’ is multiple, could not muster the collective nerve to pronounce a verdict.
The prosecution presented a coherent narrative: the accused sought a professional killer, discussed payment, and provided details. The defence argued entrapment or exaggeration, the classic modern evasion. But let us be honest: the real issue is that we have lost faith in the capacity of a jury to judge. We have flooded them with information, cross-examined them with nuance, and left them bewildered. The Norwegian system, admirable in its egalitarian intent, now founders on the reef of ambiguity.
What of the retrial? It will come, likely with the same evidence, the same arguments, and the same risk of a hung jury. This is a waste of public money and, more importantly, a waste of societal energy. We need to ask ourselves: is the right to a unanimous verdict more sacred than the right to a society safe from contract killers? The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that some cases demanded a robust verdict. They had a passion for closure, for a narrative that satisfied the public conscience. We, by contrast, dither.
This case also highlights a cultural shift. Norway, a nation built on fjord-hardened individualism, now exhibits the indecisiveness of a debating society. The ‘hitman’ label itself is a romanticisation. We are not dealing with a figure from a John Le Carré novel but a thug with delusions of grandeur. Yet the trial treats him as a complex psychological subject, not a menace. This is intellectual decadence: the tendency to analyse away all moral clarity.
In the end, the hung jury is a betrayal of the victim, the intended victim, and the society that demands order. It is a quiet admission that our institutions are no longer fit for purpose. The Vikings would have laughed at such floundering. We should not. We must demand that justice be swift and certain, or prepare for the creeping anarchy of unresolved disputes. The Mistrial of Oslo may be forgotten in a week, but its message is not. It is the sound of a civilisation losing its nerve.
As I write this, I am reminded of Lord Acton: ‘Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due.’ A hung jury is the failure of that will. Norway, and the West, must do better.
