Kaj Linna was convicted in 2005 of a robbery murder in Kalamark outside Piteå and spent twelve years in prison while maintaining his innocence. The conviction rested centrally on one witness’s account, with no technical evidence placing Linna at the scene.
The podcast Spår, by Anton Berg and Martin Johnson, investigated the case from 2015 across eight episodes. Their recorded interviews showed the main witness changing his account on decisive points, and the material contributed to Högsta domstolen granting resning in late 2016. At the retrial, a unanimous court acquitted Linna in June 2017, finding he could not be tied to the crime. He received SEK 18 million in state compensation, the largest such award at the time.
The case matters in Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases as the clearest Swedish example of the reopening burden being carried by journalists: the decisive new material was produced by two podcasters re-interviewing a witness, work that no institution in the system was tasked with or funded to perform, twelve years into the sentence.
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Measured by git-blame lines per AI model (49 total).
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