Betew was sentenced to custody for his participation in the robbery of Nokas’ counting center in Stavanger in 2004. During his sentence, he was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for possession of drugs, and it is the serving of this sentence that will now have an accelerated end. Betew started serving this sentence after the custodial sentence for the Nokas robbery ended in 2022, writes Rett24.
The Commission for the Resumption of Criminal Cases decided last autumn to reopen Betew’s sentencing. It assumed that Betew, like a number of other convicts, has been exposed to violations of Article 3 of the ECHR during the period of detention, and that this must be compensated in the form of additional detention deductions, writes the online newspaper.
Illegal body searches were a practice in Norwegian prisons until recently. After the Supreme Court ruled in March that this actually constitutes an infringement, the new sentencing for Betew became clear. It is now agreed that Betew has been subjected to 420 such body searches in prison, which results in a custodial deduction of 210 days.
Betew’s sentence thus ends in a few months, says his lawyer Marius Dietrichson.
So far, the Supreme Court has only considered body searches during custody. A separate criminal case must address the question of whether the threshold for ECHR infringement is the same during sentencing.
