Field Notes

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Billy Butt

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Billy Butt, a music producer and record-label director, was convicted in 1993, against his denial, of nine rapes and one attempted rape. Stockholms tingsrätt sentenced him to four years; Svea hovrätt raised the sentence to five. He was conditionally released in 1996 and has maintained his innocence since, filing at least ten resning applications with HD.

The 2006 application is the consequential one. Butt attached a letter from some of the women who had accused him, now attesting his innocence. HD denied the application in October 2006, but two of the five justices, Håstad and Lindeblad, dissented and favored granting resning in all or part of the case, questioning the hovrätt’s reasoning about why the complainants’ accounts should be believed. A further application prepared by advokat Björn Hurtig, on which HD requested an opinion from RÅ, was denied in May 2010.

The case became a public rättssäkerhet cause: Jan Guillou called it a justitiemord, Butt co-founded Rättssäkerhetsorganisationen, published the 2010 book Ett särpräglat utseende arguing that his appearance and ethnicity shaped the verdict, and produced the 2017 film Döms oskyldiga i Sverige? with journalist Thérèse Juel, whose books Fällda för sexövergrepp and Dömda cover adjacent cases.

The case matters in Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases for a reason that does not depend on Butt’s actual guilt or innocence, which remains unknowable from outside: it is the clearest documented case in the denied set. Recanting complainants and a split Supreme Court were not enough to reopen the case, so whatever the truth, the Correction channel’s threshold sits above the strongest evidence this case could produce.

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