

Norwegian bomber and Utøya killer Anders Breivik ruled sane - thomasfl
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/24/world/europe/norway-breivik-trial/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

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thomasfl
If the killer was not ruled sane, he could have been set free after his
medichal treatment had ended.

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lifeisstillgood
If he is ruled sane, then his killing 60 people is considered the actions of a
sane person. his rationle and entire defence was not he did not do it, but
that he did it to wake People to the awful democratic liberal open society -
basically they just declared terrorism a sane response to democracy.

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mhd
Drawing a line for mental health is hard. Where would you put it? Are
religious people sane? Helicopter parents? Fanboys? People with fetishes? All
that isn't exactly completely reasonable. It's been said that sanity is more
about consensus, than rationality.

Terrorism itself surely can be a sane act. Sanity has nothing to do with
morality. Spreading terror to win your battles has been practised since
antiquity, war paint, bag pipes, guerilla warfare. I would find it hard to
draw the line right here. Then it wouldn't take much to say that by
definition, _every_ killer is insane.

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tokenizer
Absolutely. Insanity would be considered in the medical sense in a court room,
not in a societies preconceived notion of what insanity means.

Webster defines it as, "a severely disordered state of the mind usually
occurring as a specific disorder (as paranoid schizophrenia)".

This means that they concluded that he committed the crime in a non disordered
state, and his mental health did not point to any particular disorder. Just
because someone holds extremely radical views (you mentioned religion,
politics can also be included) doesn't mean someone is insane.

However, I'm sure it was a very close call.

