![]() ![]() That legal strategy - where defendants argue they were provoked by an unwanted same-sex sexual advance - is still admissible in many parts of the world. ![]() He believes that the so-called 'gay panic' defence proved an effective way for many defendants to get more lenient sentencing for what he considers to have been hate crimes. Facundo Unia, a gay rights activist in Stockholm, covered some of these as a journalist. In the 1980s and 1990s, the country saw a series of killings of gay men. In his view, details such as the anti-gay literature found at the killer's home were not given proper consideration either.īut he says that there has been real progress in recognising hate crimes against minorities in Sweden. "They just relied on the story that his killer told them."ĭennis Martinsson, an assistant professor and expert in criminal law at Stockholm University, is of the same opinion. "I don't think the courts got to hear enough about what type of guy Peter actually was," he says, adding that they would have a hard time finding anyone in Vasteras who wouldn't describe him as harmless. He has always believed that the verdict was wrong. To this day, the way Karlsson was portrayed in the courtroom bothers him. Lundmark followed the case closely as it made its way through the Swedish justice system. The type who made everyone around him smile." "Peter was the kind of guy who, if he saw you were home, he'd stop by and take the time to strike up a conversation. "I just sat there in shock, trying to process what I had heard," he says. Before that, he had coached Karlsson as a youth player in Vasteras for the better part of a decade. Lundmark had led Sweden to their legendary first Olympic gold medal at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics of 1994. He took the call sitting at his kitchen table, just up the road from where Karlsson had grown up. The morning after Karlsson's death, the phone rang at the home of Sweden's national ice hockey team manager, Curt Lundmark. Karlsson belonged to a talented generation of players from Vasteras The killer was sentenced to eight years in prison. When searching his home, the police had found pamphlets with anti-gay propaganda.īut despite this, and the brutal use of force, the supreme court upheld the original verdict it was manslaughter, rather than murder. The court had to rely heavily on the testimony of the defendant, who said that he was stricken by rage and panic. There were no witnesses to what happened that night. He was left so brutally injured that one of the first police officers on the scene, a man who had coached him as a youth player, didn't recognise him. In the minutes that followed, the man stabbed Karlsson in his chest, head, face and back. He said they walked in the same direction for a while, before Karlsson told him he thought he was attractive and forced himself on him by grabbing his head. He claimed that he bumped into Karlsson on his way back from a night out in Vasteras, a town about an hour's drive west of Stockholm. In the three rounds of court cases that followed Karlsson's death - eventually it went all the way to Sweden's supreme court - the defendant maintained that what happened was not premeditated, that he had been "provoked". Karlsson never made it home from a Friday night out in spring 1995.Īccording to court documents, the 19-year-old man who confessed to killing him was a member of a local skinhead group with ties to the neo-Nazi movement. ![]() Friends and activists are still angered by the events that followed. More than two decades have passed since the tragic death of 29-year-old ice hockey player Peter Karlsson. We would have been given some breathing space." I think playing the game wouldn't be on the table had it happened today. "There were a couple of us out on the ice that knew him well. "It was completely absurd," Rohlin says now. He remembers that there was a minute of silence before the whistle, and that they were soundly beaten. Vasteras had a decisive play-off game the following day. What Rohlin does remember is that training got pushed back an hour. He can't remember where he was when he first heard that it was a man with ties to a neo-Nazi group who had been arrested, or that police suspected his friend had been killed after making a pass at the man. He can't remember whether it was there in the locker room that he learned just how brutal the killing had been, that his friend had been stabbed 64 times. ![]()
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