Justice, Norway?
Is it not true that your justice system, at most, might put him away for 30 years for crimes against humanity, in a comfortable prison with plenty of amenities? More likely, he'l serve ten or fifteen and then be paroled. Is not that the case for most criminals in Norway? Moreover, if I understand correctly, a typical establishment, such as Halden prison, has flat screen tvs for each prisoner, private baths, and other wonderful amenities that many less deserving persons, I should note, are quite without (incidentally, it's hardly the responsibility of the Norwegian government to provide the less fortunate with anything, but most of them are infinitely more deserving than many of the people who might end up in such a prison, just as a point of comparison.) Perhaps the gods will be good, and he'll go back to Ila?
I could offer arguments in favor of retribution. They won't, however, do much good. Apparently, along the way some people decided that an eye for an eye was barbaric, and that visiting evil upon the evil was immoral. I'm not sure when this happened, and it seems childishly foolish to me, particularly in the way that it doesn't really fit the darwinian world we live in.
As you will, however. But I think it should be noted that this man murdered seventy-six people. Most of them were young, and they died screaming, crying, and begging for a future they would never live. I do not think that telling their stories will touch the heart of their killer: he believes in what he did. Are the tears of the bereaved considered justice, provided the perpetrator of the atrocity has those tears presented to him?
This, perhaps, is your point, that he will be treated well even though he is a monster. You will do good to him, as a society, even though he is a mass-murderer. You will use your money, the effort of your arms, legs, and mind, to provide him with food, shelter, clothing, education, and even entertainment, with only the loss of his freedom. He will, as it were, be adopted as your child, and provided with all the benefits a parent would provide to a loved child. He will have doctors to care for his flesh and doctors to examine his mind, and should he desire it, holy men for his soul, assuming he has one.
His victims, however, you will lay in the cold, hard earth. Their names will be forgotten, their stories will fade into dust. Their flesh will putrefy and rot, and they will never laugh, or sing, or dance, or cry, or fuck, or read, or do anything, ever, again. While this man lives in a comfortable room, reading books, watching movies, listening to music, eating nourishing food, paid for by the families of his victims and the society that they belong to.
If you were to find a poisonous spider in your house, you might well kill it without a second thought. But the spider bears you no malice, no hate. It merely is a spider, and you kill it for being a danger to you. If a bacteria invaded your body, you would poison it with antibiotics. But it was not evil, it merely did what bacteria do. Yet, let a man kill seventy-six other human beings, with faculties to understand what he does as well as volition to choose otherwise, and let the heavens fall before we deign to treat him less humanely than a child who has misbehaved.
This isn't justice. It's a shot of ephemeral righteousness, morphine for your outraged sensibilities, invisible bandages for your wounds, inflation for the ego. You aren't doing anything to this man - it's the high point of his life, from his point of view, and now he will have the chance to relive it in detail. You aren't helping the victims - they are now to be required to relive the waking nightmare of bereavement. At best, a ritual is being engaged in that will result in everyone feeling a bit more self-righteous, while the bad man that they consider themselves to be so merciful towards is packed off to experience a decade or two of enforced comfort before release into the society that he claims to hate anyway.
This is less than nothing. This is ash on the wind, and salt in the earth.
