Fritz Moen

Fritz Yngvar Moen (17 December 1941 – 28 March 2005) was a Norwegian man wrongfully convicted of two distinct murders, serving a total of 18 years in prison.

In June 1943 he was placed in an orphanage in Skjeberg.

It is unclear whether he lived with his mother in the period before this, or whether he was already staying in an infant home.

Moen's father died on the Eastern Front in 1944 and never met his son.

Fritz had little or no contact with his mother after he arrived at the orphanage.

The mother married in 1947.

She later had two sons.

Moen was born almost deaf and had no contact with other deaf people, neither children nor adults, from the time he was 1½ years old until he was 7-8 years old.

In the childhood years when hearing children learn to speak and understand concrete and abstract concepts and nuances, Moen grew up without adequate opportunities and had a stunted development.

He had no family or other contacts to go to on weekends and holidays.

These conditions were, according to witness psychologists and deaf interpreters, a contributing factor to his later social problems and major problems with language comprehension.

Moen was convicted for two separate rapes and murders, both in Trondheim:

The prosecuting authorities relied on Moen's confession to the murders, which appears to have been coerced by way of intimidation.

Biological samples were collected at both crime scenes and tested with technology available at the time, but the samples were then lost and destroyed for reasons that remain unclear.

When Moen was convicted, his defence lawyer, Olav Hestenes, announced: "For the first time at this desk, I allow myself to say that a travesty of justice has been committed."

The judge,, reacted furiously and later applauded the court's verdict.

Solberg has become notorious for miscarriages of justice, having also been instrumental in the wrongful conviction of Atle Hage, a father who was convicted of incest, took his own life after his release from prison, and was cleared ten years later when his children testified on his behalf.

Moen's lawyer requested a new trial for both cases on 2 January 2000.

The court accepted the request for the Sigrid Heggheim case, and on 7 October 2004 judge Wenche Skjæggestad announced that the court had quashed the conviction and acquitted Moen for the rape and attempted murder of Sigrid Heggheim.

The court found that the forensic evidence exonerated Moen, and that in any case reasonable doubt should have acquitted him in the first place.

Among other things, he had an alibi for the most likely time of the crime.

The forensic evidence indicated that the perpetrator had pursued the victim across a field, knocked her down, and then tied her with her own clothes — Moen was partly paralysed and physically incapable of these actions.

The court rejected the appeal against Moen's conviction in the Torunn Finstad case, and on 13 October 2005, the Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission received a preliminary application to review the case.

When Moen died on 28 March 2005 of natural causes, it became known that he wanted the case on his behalf to continue.

In December 2005, it became known that Tor Hepsø, a convicted criminal with a long history of violence, had made a deathbed confession to killing both Sigrid Heggheim and Torunn Finstad.

On 15 June 2006, the Criminal Cases Review Commission formally accepted the application, and on 24 August 2006, the Frostating court posthumously acquitted Fritz Moen for the rape and murder of Sigrid Heggheim.

It found that the preponderance of evidence made Hepsø a more likely suspect, and that Moen's confession was likely coerced and only included information that had been made public.

These two acquittals are widely attributed to the work of Moen's defence lawyer John Christian Elden and private investigator Tore Sandberg.

In the aftermath of the acquittals, Fritz Moen's lawyers filed a civil suit against the Norwegian government seeking 28 million NOK (€3 million).

After the convictions were quashed, an official inquiry was instigated to establish what had gone wrong in the authorities' handling of the case, and on 25 June 2007 the commission delivered harsh criticism to the police, the prosecution and the courts in what was immediately termed Norway's worst miscarriage of justice of all time.

Moen was deaf and had a severe speech impediment.

He was also partially paralysed, but had normal intelligence and good memory.

Moen was the son of a Norwegian woman (Betzy Moen) and a German corporal (Fritz Robert Hellmann).

His father served during the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War.

Moen was deaf from birth, and his mother decided she could not take care of him.

On 25 June 2007 a commission headed by Henry John Mæland, professor of law at the University of Bergen, delivered its findings to the Norwegian Minister of Justice Knut Storberget.

The commission stated that the principle of objectivity was violated repeatedly by both the police and the courts.

The case was settled in April 2008 when the presiding judge awarded 20 million NOK.

The case caused widespread public debate in Norway.

There were calls for a formal inquiry into the conduct of the prosecutors and police, and in 2008 the newspaper Aftenposten proposed erecting a bust or statue of Moen in front of the Norwegian Ministry of Justice as a symbol of the responsibilities of the criminal justice system, although there so far has been no sign of this being taken seriously.