1. After World War Two, Norway carried out its last executions, mostly of Nazi collaborators. What are those executions thought of by Norwegians? What are their opinions of the death penalty in America? 
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3. Returning to Punishment - Capital Style
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5. Basic values must come first when we discuss crime and punishment. It is no problem preventing thieves from continuing to steal -just brand a warning on their foreheads! We did this in some periods. Or for kids that misbehave a bloody dose of flogging in public places could do the trick. Or those that forensic psychiatry say are dangerous - put them away for life. We do not, we can not. The penal system of a country creates a mirror of that society. It tells us who we are. Certain images become unacceptable basic values among most of us. One such is capital punishment and having a state which kills. The last ordinary execution in Norway took place in 1876. The last extraordinary one, after World War II, took place in 1948. More were sentenced to die, but soldiers in the Kings Guard who had to carry out the job by shooting them gradually became so unhappy with this task that the executions came to a halt. I have this story directly from the man who conveyed the soldiers' views to the political authorities. In 1950 the death penalty was again formally abolished, and from 1979 it was also abolished from our military penal law. The reactions of the men in the Kings Guard could be understood in the light of the difference between the killers and the non-killers in the Norwegian concentration camps. In the immediate aftermath of the war those executed were seen only as Nazis, but as time went by, they 'reappeared' as human beings. 
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7. But it was not just the soldiers who were troubled by the killings. The judges were also troubled. I described a case in my book 'A suitable amount of crime' (Christie 2004) and repeat it here, because it is so typical of what happens. It was a serious case. A man had received the death penalty in the lower courts, and now that decision was to be tried in the Supreme Court. The man had collaborated with the German occupiers at the very top level. He had joined the Nazi cabinet created by Quisling and functioned as Minister of Cultural Affairs during the occupation. The accused does not usually appear in the Supreme Court in person. But the accused may insist on attending, and this man did. Day after day he was escorted to the courtroom. He was the prototype of a civil servant of his day. Tired, pale, with a sad face, a worn suit like those his judges also once used to wear, with a polite voice, respectful manners and vocabulary. As a lawyer by education, he could have been one of them, if not for a fatal belief in a different political system. For this man the Supreme Court changed the death sentence to one of life imprisonment. A participant in the process told me many years later that in his opinion it was the former minister's daily appearance in the Supreme Court that saved his life. There was no doubt that his acts were criminal according to the interpretation of the law seen as valid at the time, but this man came too close to his judges to be considered a criminal unworthy to live
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10. Executions in Modernity
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12. Today, the use of death as punishment has come to an end in all European states. It is the price European states have to pay to be members of the Council ofEurope.2 It is just a pity the US is not under the same pressure. In 2010 they executed 46, in 2011 43, and the same number in 2012. The total number of executions in the US since 1976 is 1,321. More than 3,000 are on death row, waiting for execution. They have to wait a long time - generally it takes more than ten years from receiving the death sentence to being killed, if this happens at all (Death Penalty Information Centre 2013). Seen from a Western European perspective it is difficult to understand the US on this point. It is something peculiar in the US, something important to understand also outside the US. It was a landing place for immigrants behaving as if they had come to an empty land. This led to actions close to genocide of the native populations. Later it became a slave state. Slaves, and later black people, were the major targets for the executioners. David Garland (2006) describes one of the old executions in a recent paper: Thousands of white people thronged around the black man to be killed, fought to come close, fought to get possession of a bit of his clothes, fought to get the best photo - as a souvenir for the mantelpiece. Bloody Europeans, Norwegians certainly among them, were 'heroically' confronting the 'wild animals' from Africa, animals not knowing their place in the new world.
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14. But Garland is not trapped in the simple idea that the continued use of the death penalty in the US is a historical relic - a continuation of slavery traditions. Instead he finds an explanation by looking at the US as a land of fundamental cleavages. The founding fathers created a weak federal government, one where each of the states were given autonomy over their criminal justice system. And here keeping the death penalty came to be a symbol of independence from a centralized federal power. ' ... the collective killing of hated criminals (or merely the assertion of the right to do so) remains one of the ways in which groups of people express their autonomy, invoke traditional values, and assert their local identity'. (Garland 2006: 23). But there is ambivalence, counterforces are also in action. Several states in the US have abolished the use of the death penalty and Federal authorities regulate the forms of executions. It has to be a death without pain; deaths by poison, but not until those who are to die are heavily tranquillized. But before death they wait - for years. I was in Utah, the Mormon state on the west coast of the US, when I came up against the gravity of this problem. A very courageous British PhD student was deeply involved in understanding life among those waiting for execution on death row.3 She came so close to them that the next in line for execution asked her to attend, to be there when he was killed. So she did. Why was this man killed, poisoned to death? He could not stand it any more. He could not stand waiting for death, among all the others also waiting. So he cancelled all appeals. The state was forced to kill him. The authorities did not like it. He broke the main rule. They were to decide on his death, not he. He empowered himself by declaring an end to the charade. He was very popular among those on that death row. They begged him to go on living by further appeals. He refused and died with a feeling that he had once again become a man. 
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17. Death - or Life as a Death
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19. For me, this drama in Utah brings us straight into a most unpleasant dilemma: I am a strong opponent of the use of capital punishment. The practice must come to an end, be abolished. As long as there is life, there is hope. Until the moment of execution new facts might appear, or new attitudes among those who govern. And fundamental to an abolitional stand is the ethical command: Thou shall not kill. But then there are the embarrassing similarities between death and a life resembling death. If the alternative to death is imprisonment for natural life, is this an obvious improvement? Or even more complicated: If countries that abolish the use of death thereby feel both obliged, or more free, to increase the use of imprisonment, is it then obvious that this brings us closer to fundamental values? Self-confident authorities can sit back and say 'We are not like our brutal neighbours across the border. We don't kill. We only keep them - and an extra quota similar to them - imprisoned until they die a natural death. Or we take their lives away for periods of these lives'. We are forced to look at the unpleasant similarities between death and imprisonment. What is the essence of imprisonment? It is to remove human beings from ordinary life. It is to take ordinary parts of life away from individuals, forever, or for important periods of their lives. We ought not to exaggerate the difference between these two types of punishments; death and imprisonment. This is clearly seen if we go back to the situation in the state of Utah with the prisoner who made the choice to die rather than spending the rest of his life in prison not knowing when and how his life would end. Would tomorrow be the day of his execution? Or maybe that would not happen at all - and he would die a natural death. He knew it was life in a box, every day, every month, every year - a whole life - growing old and feeble there, and then a 'natural death'. And all the time closely watched to prevent something terrible happening, such as the prisoner escaping by jumping the wall, or committing suicide. What a defeat for the system if that happened!  
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21. What to Expect in the Future? 
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23. In my evaluation, the European ban on death by killing is far from safely established. I do not wholly share the optimism expressed in several recent articles by Roger Hood (2009, 2010), but hope his views will prove to be the right ones. In particular, I think the ban on killing is far from safely established in some states in Eastern Europe. With a political split, particularly if states were no longer interested in membership of the Council of Europe, forces in favour of reintroducing death as punishment might gain increased strength. I also fear what might happen if social cleavages as well as economic troubles increase. But is the situation stable in Scandinavia? Yes, and no. Yes, if we think of physical death. lf we escape extreme social conflict, war or natural catastrophe, I can't imagine that physical death will be reintroduced as a type of punishment in our Northern societies, but in times of turmoil, reinstating the death penalty will always tempt the powers that be. 
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25. The Danger of Affluence
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27. But then there is the other form of death: imprisonment, living death. Here I think the Scandinavian situation is a vulnerable one. Taking away parts of life in the form of imprisonment, that form of death I fear will expand in the Nordic societies, - maybe particularly in Norway. Why? Because we have become so rich! Most ofus have increased our standard of living immensely. And at the same time, the rich have increased their material wealth even more. In old-fashioned language: class differences have increased. And the wealth of the upper classes is made visible to an extent earlier unknown. Rich people in Scandinavia in earlier centuries had a certain inhibition against displaying their affluence. That trend is gone. This means a society with increased social distance - the perfect breeding ground for social conflicts of a type preventing parties from seeing those on the other side as valuable human beings. Two types of mobility work in the same direction. First upward social mobility; you leave your less successful friends or relatives behind. 
28. Secondly geographical mobility. In this process, old-fashioned villages, or stable and long-established quarters within cities disappear. These were places where inhabitants saw each other, knew each other, and were also able to some extent both to help and to control each other. When they disappear, deviance is converted into crime and social control becomes a task for officials. The ground is fertile for increased trouble of a type the state is ready to meet with the police force and imprisonment. And what to do in such a situation? I have no more space left for a discussion of this. Only one sentence: For a country like Norway, it is not obvious that the answers for our future are to be found in that future. They might be found in our past. 

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