Linda, As in the Linda Murder

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On the second Monday in October the Swedish Newspapermen’s Association in Stockholm held a large meeting where they discussed various matters of legal principle arising from the now notorious Linda murder. A number of the most elevated media figures in the country were on the panel, and the jewel in this media crown was naturally the editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter.

However, he was far from being the loftiest person present, if one were to try to arrange them in order of precedence at a state banquet, because the introductory speaker and guest of honour was none other than the Chancellor of Justice, CJ himself.

CJ expressed serious misgivings about the manner in which the police had investigated the Linda murder and other similar cases in recent years. According to the information he had requested, the police in Växjö, in collaboration with their colleagues from the National Crime Unit, had collected voluntary DNA samples from almost seven hundred people, samples which proved that their donors had absolutely nothing to do with the crime in question.

According to information that his investigators had gathered from the National Crime Unit, the crime had actually been solved in the traditional way, through a combination of information received, witness statements and detective work. The perpetrator’s DNA had played a not insubstantial role in the evidence presented by the prosecutor in the preliminary investigation. That notwithstanding, and without prejudicing the outcome of the trial, CJ believed that the evidence gathered by more traditional means was more than sufficient to support the prosecutor’s decision to bring the case to trial.

Speaking personally, CJ was strongly opposed to the use of the word voluntary in a context which actually concerned the ability of the police and prosecutors to employ so-called mandatory legal methods. As he saw it, these could not be reconciled, and so he welcomed the proposal of the so-called DNA inquiry to expand the judicial authorities’ powers to gather DNA samples, conduct DNA analysis and record the results of these. The question of whether or not this was voluntary would soon be obsolete, and in the best of all worlds obviously everyone’s DNA would be on file from birth in a comprehensive national database. For their own good, naturally.

In conclusion, he also took the opportunity to compliment the media for their scrutiny. With touching modesty, he declared that he couldn’t be sure that he would have noticed the problem unless the media had alerted him in time.

The representatives of the media hadn’t had any serious comments on CJ’s analysis and conclusions. This was an important question, of decisive significance to every democracy under the rule of law, and, according to the editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, it would be given even greater prominence in his own paper, if that were possible. From a personal point of view, he was both proud and happy that he and his talented colleagues had got the ball rolling.

The chair of the Swedish Newspapermen’s Association, who was leading the debate, finally took the opportunity to ask the editor-in-chief of the Småland Post — since he was actually there, and because they didn’t exactly meet every day — why one of the smaller regional papers had declined to publish an article which Sweden’s largest morning paper had gone to press with immediately, following it up with numerous editorials and other reports in the news pages.

The editor-in-chief of the Småland Post thanked him for the question. Without going into detail, he felt he could none the less reveal that the decision had involved his personal knowledge of the author of the piece, knowledge which might not have been possessed by his colleagues at Dagens Nyheter, or which they might have chosen to disregard. What did he, a simple peasant from the provinces, know about the decision-making process at the country’s finest paper?

Nevertheless, he had personally taken the decision to turn down the article by the librarian Marian Gross. He hadn’t regretted the decision for a moment, and if he was presented with a similar choice in future, he was confident that he would make the same decision again.

After that they moved on to the Opera Bar, the veranda of the Grand Hotel, and other nearby watering-holes catering to a wealthier clientele, and, as usual, carried on the debate long into the night before the participants finally headed home to their families for a few hours of well-deserved rest.