When Life Isn't Life

"You executed the defenseless Mr. S. in a cowardly way. Unlike you, he didn't retreat into his childhood bedroom — he worked, he enjoyed football, he got qualifications."

'[You are a loner living in your childhood bedroom at the age of 27, soaking up] crude conspiracy theories [on the internet and building weapons]."

"You are a danger to humanity [showing no remorse and when in court only repeated] absurd [ideology]."

"You are a fanatical, ideologically motivated lone perpetrator. You are anti-Semitic and xenophobic."

"You showed no indication of remorse. On the contrary, you repeatedly made clear that you wanted to continue your fight."

"Consequently, we have decided that society must be protected from you."

Judge Ursula Mertens, regional court, Hlle, Germany

 

"The verdict makes clear that murderous hatred of Jews meets with no tolerance." 

"Up to the end, the attacker showed no remorse, but kept to his hate-filled anti-Semitic and racist world view."

Josef Shuster, head, Germany’s Central Council of Jews

 

"None of the hate-filled conspiracies that this man has voiced are new."

"We’ve heard them all before. And we know where they lead. We know what happens when this propaganda and this speech goes unchecked."

"Germany knows it. I know it."

Talya Feldman, synagogue attack survivor

Accused Stephan Balliet stands in the courtroom of the regional court at the beginning of the trial in Magdeburg, Germany, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (Hendrik Schmidt/dpa via AP)

"Inmates live in rooms and sleep in beds, not on concrete or steel slabs with thin padding. They have privacy -- correctional officers knock before entering. Prisoners wear their own clothes, and can decorate their space as they wish. They cook their own meals, are paid more for their work and have opportunities to visit family, learn skills and gain education."

"[The cells are] more like dorm rooms at a liberal arts college than the steel and concrete boxes most U.S. prisoners call home."

Visiting American Justice and Corrections authorities, Vice

This is a description of the German penal system accommodation for federal prisoners sentenced to prison for any number of serious crimes against society, including murder. A similar type of confinement and opportunities in a 'humane' prison system can be found in Norway.  German law has it that the purpose of criminal confinement is a method that leads to rehabilitation. The theory being that someone has gone temporarily astray in psychotic acts against society's best interests and must be gently led back to their natural inclination to live in peace and solidarity with other citizens of Germany.

 

Mourners outside the door of the synagogue in Halle, Germany, last year.Credit...Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

This is called forward-looking liberal penology. Advanced nations of the world sympathizing with the plight of the pathologically criminal element among them, the sociopaths and the psychopaths; viewing them all as salvageable, to return them to a pacific state of psychological well-being and acceptance of their role in a well-oiled society through acts of kind solicitation for their welfare. The victims, on the other hand, must accept that those who sinned against them were momentarily bereft of their senses and are deserving of rehabilitation, not ongoing punishment.

Take the case of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed 8 people with a bomb and later shot 69 other people -- including many teens -- dead on a island nearby Oslo in July of 2011, serving Norway's maximum sentence of 21 years. He was given a room of his own with all the comforts that German prisons offer, but attempted to sue the state arguing that strict conditions imposed upon him through isolation violated his human rights. 

 

Eligible to seek parole after serving the first ten years of his sentence term of 21 years in July 2021, it will be left to the courts to make the determination whether such a release is appropriate. "I have at his demand sent a request for parole. This is a right that all prisoners have and that he wants to use", said his lawyer, Oeystein Storrvik. "I feel quite safe that the Norwegian judicial system will do the right thing", tweeted Vegard Wennesland, a survivor of the attack on Utoeya island.

 

In Germany on Monday a regional court imposed the most extreme penalty available; life imprisonment for Jew-hater Stephan Balliet who last year on Yom Kippur in the city of Halle attempted to storm a synagogue to shoot to death the 51 congregants gathered within to pray. A special budget exists for the protection of synagogues through the German federation but no special precautions for Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement had been taken. The synagogue, however, had installed a thick wood entrance capable of withstanding a violent onslaught.

The synagogue's locked gate and CCTV system were all that stood between the attacker and worshippers inside

 

Determined to gain entrance while the Jewish congregants watched on security cameras as he shot repeatedly at the door without success Bailliet shot to death a 20-year-old woman passing by then rampaged through a kebab shop nearby where he confronted and shot to death a disabled 20-year-old man who begged for his life. He wounded two other people before he fled the scene. He was outside Halle when police caught up to him and confiscated a camera mounted on a helmet that recorded his actions which he obviously meant to post on social media.

Most criminals who stand trial in Germany are treated to a 'faint hope' protocol. And most of those who received "life" sentences become parole-eligible in 15 years. And lucky man, rehabilitation efforts are in his future, hope not denied the man whose plan was to slaughter as many Jews as he could manage. His punishment won't be hard to take for a man who lived as a recluse, with an increasing number of German states permitting restricted internet access for prisoners.

What is so very fascinating is that Germany is concerned with quality of life for its malefactors, with offering them a rainbow of hope for their futures; yes, they may be incarcerated for unspeakable crimes but all is not lost, they are given the opportunity to reclaim their futures by accommodating themselves to the penal authorities' efforts to lead them toward repentance and rehabilitation. This is the same nation that saw fit a lifetime ago to incarcerate Jews en masse in ghettoes preparatory to sending them to forced labour, gas chambers and death.

But at the present time, judges sitting in an atmosphere of liberal penology insist that the penalty for a crime must not be without limits much less absolute, where the potential for diminished sentences exist, crimes of horrendous nature not excluded. Whereas judges during the period of the Third Reich officially stamped their approval over the removal of citizenship and human rights for Germany's Jews, agreeing them to be sub-human, a pestilence upon the nation.

In December 1959, two members of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) right-wing extremist party painted swastikas and the words "Germans demand: Jews out" on the synagogue in Cologne. Anti-Semitic graffiti emerged across the country. The perpetrators were convicted, and the Bundestag passed a law against "incitement of the people," which remains on the books to this day.