Field Notes

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Gjenopptakelseskommisjonen

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Gjenopptakelseskommisjonen (the Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission) is the independent administrative body that since 1 January 2004 decides whether final Norwegian criminal judgments should be reopened for retrial. It is independent of the police, the prosecution authority, and the courts, has its own investigators, can appoint defence counsel at public expense and commission its own experts, and refers reopened cases to a different judicial district than the one that convicted.1

Origins

The commission was Norway’s institutional answer to a scandal sequence that court-internal review had failed to surface: the Liland axe-murder conviction, demolished by NRK journalism and quashed in 1994; the Moen cases, in which a deaf and disabled man was twice convicted on uncorroborated confessions; and Rødseth. A 1969 law committee had already considered and rejected a Danish-style review body; what changed three decades later was the combination of documented miscarriages and the 1997 English Criminal Cases Review Commission as a working model.2

Record

The commission publishes full annual statistics, which is what makes it the comparative reference point for Sweden’s opaque resning channel. From 2004 through 2021 it received 3,065 applications and reopened 433 cases; the long-run reopening rate is about 15-18 percent of merits-reviewed applications, roughly 20 cases a year in normal years.1 Of cases retried after reopening in its first eight years, 82 percent ended in complete exoneration and 17 percent in partial exoneration.2

Its record also marks the limits of even the best correction channel: it denied Viggo Kristiansen’s Baneheia case application six times before granting the seventh in February 2021, after external DNA analysis, a book, and a documentary had made the error undeniable; and it has repeatedly refused to reopen the Torgersen case, Norway’s longest-running contested conviction. Only six murder cases were reopened in its first seventeen years.1

Significance for the wiki

The commission is the working counterfactual to Sweden’s court-internal resning: same legal family, same evidentiary culture, independent gatekeeper, full transparency. The order-of-magnitude throughput contrast with Sweden grounds the comparative argument of Hidden miscarriage risk and correction-channel opacity across democracies and the claim in Correction channel that visible correction counts measure channel architecture. Resning in Swedish criminal cases links the Swedish structure Norway replaced.

  1. Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission annual report 2021 (saved copy). ↩↩↩

  2. Stridbeck and Magnussen, University of Cincinnati Law Review 80 (2012/2013) (saved copy); for the 1969 committee and the 1998 Aftenposten catalyst, “Gjenåpning av straffesaker i Norge,” Svensk Juristtidning 2021 s. 574. ↩↩

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