Pocket man

The highest-profile criminal case here is the "Pocket Man" case, which involves an older man tricking/forcing/coercing young boys to touch his genitals or, in some cases, to perform oral sex. I remember seeing police fliers asking for information from the public when we first moved here, and he was finally arrested in early 2008. The official filing of criminal charges against him at trial has just been made public and details hundreds of offenses dating all the way back to 1969. He is only charged in 54 incidents, since offenses from more than 10 years ago can't be brought due to the statute of limitations; of these, he has admitted to involvement in 20, which are not coincidentally those cases for which the police have DNA evidence. He faces up to 21 years in prison, which is the maximum penalty for anything here in Norway.

He also recently endeared himself further to the populace by filing a criminal complaint against one of his accusers, saying that the then-seven-year-old victim should be charged for exaggerating the severity of what happened to him ten years ago in his police testimony. He did, however, at least have sense enough to get a new lawyer after his first one went to the press to defend him with the argument that a little child molestation is not really that big of a deal.

One thing that's very different here is that he has been in custody for the better part of two years now, and it was only yesterday he was finally named by VG, Norway's largest-circulation paper. The press go out of their way not to name criminal defendants so as not to prejudice the legal case against them, and also because they can be sued by said defendants for invasion of privacy and be forced to pay lots of restitution. In the States, where criminal defendants, victims and often witnesses are breathlessly identified by name and address long before any actual guilt or innocence can be established in court, this is unthinkable. Imagine, for instance, Bernard Madoff's name being meticulously omitted from over a year's worth of discussions of his fraud in every newspaper in America.