Helsingin Sanomat International Edition: Suspended sentence for police officer convicted of raping a minor
A Helsinki police constable received a suspended sentence of two years' imprisonment for the rape of a minor.
The crime, which took place in November 2006, was revealed when the victim later contacted an Internet "virtual police" line.
The case was reported in the Wednesday edition of Ilta-Sanomat.
The police officer found guilty of the crime was dismissed after the investigation was completed. No other similar cases have been found in the constable's background.
According to the Deputy Chief of the Helsinki Police Department Jari Liukku, the police have also not received any other contacts from the public concerning the officer in question.
The 51-year-old constable working in the Helsinki Police Department had lured a 16-year-old girl - who had allegedly told him she was on the run from home and had nowhere to sleep - into his car and thence to his apartment by showing her his police badge.
In the apartment the girl had become intoxicated on the alcohol served to her by the officer and had fallen asleep.
After she fell asleep, the constable had raped her twice. He also took pictures of the situation, which he then placed on his personal computer.
The Helsinki District Court handed down a suspended two-year prison sentence.
The article goes on to say that Finland has been internally and internationally criticized for its "nonchalant attitude towards crimes of sexual assault", as they are in HS English.
And rightly so. I read this particular news item while I was still in prison myself, because in Finland, if a person refuses to serve in the army, they are automatically sent to prison with no possibility of a suspended sentence or parole, but if a police officer lures a 16-year old girl into his apartment and rapes her, he doesn't go to prison.
In Finland, a suspended sentence means absolutely nothing. The guy won't go to prison; he'll have a criminal record and probably be banned from working with children, and he'll have to pay some thousands of euros in damages. That's it. From a personal standpoint, the day the sentence was handed down I was in prison, and the police constable was probably in a bar somewhere, celebrating.
I can't really express the way that makes me feel, in writing or in any other medium.
The prosecutor is appealing the case, so it'll go to an appeals court. Hopefully they'll decide differently. The problem is that they can, in fact, quite easily decrease the penalty.
In my previous post, I discussed the impact of the introduction of the "lesser rape" charge, which led to a systematic decrease of sexual assault penalties. If this case, and the plethora of others like it, lead to an increase of, say, the minimum penalties for rape, this will change nothing, as the courts will simply classify more cases as "lesser rape". I dealt with the legalities of this more fully in my Finnish-language blog, so I won't get into that here. Suffice to say that Finnish criminal law, like all other Finnish law, defines everything so loosely that courts are practically free to interpret cases as they like. Even this case could easily have been tried as a "lesser rape" case, because the wording of the law is so elastic. So, in fact, the appeal by the prosecutor may very well lead to the rape conviction being overturned and replaced by a conviction for "coercive sexual contact" and a lesse penalty.
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It's almost certain that this case will reinforce the demands made in Finland for making the penalties for sex crimes harsher. The problem is that in the current Finnish justice system, this completely fails to address the core issue. Rape sentences are theoretically severe; the problem is that courts use every excuse to hand down more lenient sentences.
A far more important problem in this particular case is the fact that according to Finnish criminal law, the decision on whether a sentence must be served in prison or as a suspended sentence (i.e. nothing) is entirely up to the court's discretion. So demanding harsher penalties won't change that, either, as even if the minimum penalty for rape is raised, courts can still pass suspended sentences, meaning that the perpetrators will still be getting away with nothing. It'll just be a theoretically longer nothing.
In short, what is needed is not simply an increase in penalties for sexual assault, but a revamp of both the Finnish criminal code and the general attitude of Finnish courts. The simple fact is that in Finland, courts are clearly predisposed to let sexual offenders off with very light penalties, and the vagueness of the law lets them do it. And despite the continued public outcry over this, no-one is willing to do anything about it.
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Welcome to Finland, where a police officer can lure a 16-year old girl into his apartment, get her drunk, rape her twice and take pictures of her, and not go to prison.
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