Sweden Defends Wiki Sex Case About-Face

crimeandpunishment writes "Mistake? We didn't make a mistake. That's what Swedish prosecutors said Sunday as they defended their handling of a rape allegation against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The Swedish Prosecution Authority said the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant Friday did not make a mistake, even though a higher-ranked prosecutor withdrew the warrant the next day. A spokesperson for the Authority said: 'The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor.' Assange, who was in Sweden seeking legal protection for the site as it prepares to leak more Afghan war documents, told a Swedish tabloid newspaper, 'I don't know who's behind this but we have been warned that for example the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us.'" We covered the warrant being issued and withdrawn yesterday.

Comments

Foreshadowing.

[cosm]

They will get him. Eventually. I hope not, but I believe they will. Through defamation, assassination (character or otherwise), I just want to forecast now, that as a pessimist / realists / tinfoil hat wearer, they will get him.

Re:Foreshadowing.

[Jedi Alec]

At this stage it's going to take one hell of a trick to pull that off though. Assange's opponents don't have all that much credibility left, so even if someone does have major legitimate dirt on the guy it's gonna be a heck of a job getting public opinion on their side.

Re:Foreshadowing.

[bsDaemon]

Maybe they can put it on WikiLeaks. That'll show him!

Re:Foreshadowing.

[Cutterman]

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Cardinal Richelieu

Not a mistake?

[loteck]

If a man can be publicly accused of rape, a warrant issued for his arrest, and his name splashed all over the international media PRIOR to you being 100% sure you want to bring him in on those charges, then I would say something is seriously wrong with your system of justice.

Re:Not a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to read up on the pirate bay trial, if you really want an insight in how well the system here works. There have been plenty of fucked up cases before that, but it's unusually well covered in English. It's pretty much par of the course though when things get political or when prestige gets involved.

TL;DR: You have no idea how fucked up the system really is, and you don't want to know, just remember the next time you hear about how fantastic we are that we're really a banana monarchy under cover, without bananas.

Re:Not a mistake?

[Kidbro]

This is nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the justice system. They did not "publicly accuse" anybody of anything. They did exactly what they should do in this case. Two women contacted the police and informed them of a crime that had been committed. They needed to speak to the accused, and since it's a matter of a foreign citizen that is expected to leave the country soon, they chose consider him "anhållen i sin frånvaro", something that has somewhat wrongly been translated to "arrested", as that's the closest counterpart in English speaking nations. This, they did in order to give the police authority to actually detain him long enough for an interrogation.

The "publicly accusing", "name splashed over international media" and whatnot is the work of media, and has absolutely nothing to do with the justice system.

What would you have them do? Ignore the accusations? Interrogate the witnesses more thoroughly so the suspect had plenty of time to leave the country? Keep in mind that ill treatment (e.g. harsh interrogation shortly after the crime) of rape victims is not something that's particularly popular around here (for good reasons).

For the record, I am convinced that Assange isn't guilty (although I believe the whole thing is the result of a pair of very confused women, rather than a military conspiracy), but I honestly don't see how a justice system would become better by ignoring self proclaimed victims reporting crime to the police...

Re:Not a mistake?

[YA_Python_dev]

Warrants are public

No in Sweden they aren't.

But somehow in this particular case the information found its way to the media and the police felt compelled to immediately confirm it instead of doing what they should have according to Swedish law, refusing to comment on the identity of the person accused.

Re:Follow this story!

[betterunixthanunix]

There can be only one suspect for who was behind it: the U.S. government.

Why do you say that? Assange has pissed off a lot of world governments, and it does not take CIA level resources to have someone file a false report. The fact that the charges were withdrawn on the same day they were filed suggests that the CIA may not be involved after all -- they would do a better job than that.

Intresting facts

[Anonymous Coward]

The woman that accused Julian Assange has been identified on flashbackforum as Anna Ardin press secretary for the christians in the socialist party in Sweden. She has previously been an active radical feminist and author of articles on how to use the legal system to get revenge on people. She has also identified The Swedish Pirate party as a "problem we have to deal with" She waited several days to report this until the "on call" prosecutor Maria Häljebo Kjellstrand was on duty.