Malmö street artist given extra month in jail for hate crimes
The Local Sweden - [email protected]
Published: 26 Apr, 2019 CET.
Updated: Fri 26 Apr 2019 14:56 CET
An appeals court in Malmö has added one month to the jail sentence faced by street artist Dan Park for posting tweets using the offensive term 'blattar' to describe immigrants, and claiming rape was normal in their cultures.
The court found Park guilty of all seven charges against him, reversing the decision of the district court to find him innocent of two, and so increased his prison sentence from three to four months.
In a tweet, Park claimed that the court had made him money by ruling that a poster he had made featuring the rapper Adam Tensta, together with Malena Ernman och Zara Larsson counted as a hate crime.
"The appeals court even ruled against the Adam Tensta poster, so that has also gone up in value," he wrote.
The court also reduced the damages Park is ordered to pay the Left Party MP Momodou Jallow, one of his victims, from 15,000 kronor to 10,000 kronor.
Both Park and Jallow had appealed the district court's ruling in November.
Park shot to infamy in 2011 when he created and distributed posters with a picture of Jallow, then chair of the National Afro-Swedish Association, superimposed on the image of a naked man in chains. "Our negro slave has run away," read the text on the posters.
Jallow argued the posters were racist and offensive, while Park claimed that the purpose of the posters was to highlight the issue of free speech. Park was sentenced to six months in jail for the case in 2014.
In November, Park was found guilty of five of seven new charges of race hatred, and one case of defamation for three Twitter posts and four blog entries he made in 2015 and 2016, two of which were reposts of the cartoons for which he had previously been sentenced.
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The court found Park guilty of all seven charges against him, reversing the decision of the district court to find him innocent of two, and so increased his prison sentence from three to four months.
In a tweet, Park claimed that the court had made him money by ruling that a poster he had made featuring the rapper Adam Tensta, together with Malena Ernman och Zara Larsson counted as a hate crime.
"The appeals court even ruled against the Adam Tensta poster, so that has also gone up in value," he wrote.
The court also reduced the damages Park is ordered to pay the Left Party MP Momodou Jallow, one of his victims, from 15,000 kronor to 10,000 kronor.
Both Park and Jallow had appealed the district court's ruling in November.
Park shot to infamy in 2011 when he created and distributed posters with a picture of Jallow, then chair of the National Afro-Swedish Association, superimposed on the image of a naked man in chains. "Our negro slave has run away," read the text on the posters.
Jallow argued the posters were racist and offensive, while Park claimed that the purpose of the posters was to highlight the issue of free speech. Park was sentenced to six months in jail for the case in 2014.
In November, Park was found guilty of five of seven new charges of race hatred, and one case of defamation for three Twitter posts and four blog entries he made in 2015 and 2016, two of which were reposts of the cartoons for which he had previously been sentenced.
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