Conditional discharge of person sentenced to preventive detention

Case no. 1/2021
Order made on 24 June 2021

The Prosecution Service
vs.
T

On 19 June 2007, T was sentenced to preventive detention pursuant to Section 70 of the Danish Penal Code for violation of, among other things, Section 245(1), cf. Section 247(1), of the Penal Code.

During his time in detention, T had only been on escorted leave, and had otherwise not been offered a re-entry programme with, e.g., unescorted leave or discharge to a boarding house. The reason for this was T’s conduct during his stay, which had led to, among other things, several disciplinary sanctions being imposed on him.

Statements from a psychiatric specialist and from the Medico-Legal Council were produced during the hearing. The experts assessed, among other things, that an actual re-entry programme was an essential prerequisite for being able to perform a medical assessment of whether the previously documented imminent risk of dangerous conduct had been reduced to such an extent that it justified a relaxation of the conditions for his detention.

The Supreme Court held that, considering the temporal extent of the detention, there was a special need to offer T the re-entry programme considered by the Medico-Legal Council to be an essential prerequisite for his conditional discharge. However, the Supreme Court agreed that it was at present necessary to uphold the continuing detention order pursuant to Section 72 of the Penal Code, and that this did not amount to an infringement of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The High Court had reached the same conclusion.