Court of Appeal: Lay Judge in Murder Trial Not Biased

The background is that the lay judge – after the conclusion of the proceedings, but before the district court's verdict was announced – wrote a post on the social media platform X stating that established practice regarding sentencing for young people "must be broken" with reference to a similar case.

"For bias to exist, there must be a reasonable basis for the party's opinion that the judge is not impartial or independent. In this case, we have not found that the circumstances provide grounds for such a conclusion," says Court of Appeal Judge Christian von Szalay in a press release.

The boys, 15 and 16 years old at the time of the crime, were sentenced to ten and twelve years' imprisonment, respectively, for incitement to murder and murder of three people in their home in Tullinge and Västberga last October.