Breivik says won't appeal guilty verdict if found sane

Anders Behring Breivik, on trial for killing 77 people in Norway last July, told an Oslo court Thursday he would not appeal a certain guilty verdict if the judges deem him to be sane. "There is absolutely no reason to appeal if I am declared criminally accountable," said the 33-year-old rightwing extremist who wants to be found sane so that his Islamophobic ideology will not be considered the ravings of a lunatic. Breivik has confessed to the twin attacks but has refused to plead guilty, insisting they were "cruel but necessary" to stop the ruling Labour Party's "multicultural experiment" and the "Muslim invasion" of Norway and Europe. The question of Breivik's sanity is a focal point of the trial. A first psychiatric evaluation conducted last year by two court-appointed psychiatrists found Breivik to be psychotic, suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia". That diagnosis would likely lead to Breivik being sentenced to a closed mental ward rather than prison. But a second opinion, which the court ordered after the first one sparked a controversy, concluded that Breivik was sane enough to be held criminally responsible for his actions. On July 22, 2011, Breivik gunned down 69 people on the island of Utoeya, most of them teenagers, attending a Labour Party youth camp, while another eight died when he bombed a government building in Oslo earlier the same day.