293 another penalty was prescribed for virtually all crimes, namely, doing public penance; the offender had to suffer humiliation by confessing his crime in church. Otherwise, the forms of punishment were characterized by the way they often served as commutations — a death sentence would be commuted to a fine, a fine to corporal punishment — and by the way they were often combined with each other. 4. The 1,774 cases referred to Göta High Court were distributed as follows: 800 sexual offences 355 thefts 485 crimes of violence 134 other crimes. Of these cases, 76 per cent or 1,342 had led to death sentences in the lower courts. The high court ruled in 1,262 or 94 per cent of these cases, which shows its importance as the instance which decided the issue of the life or death of convicts up until the 1690s. Of the 80 death sentences referred for settlement to the King in Council, 61 occurred in the last of the three studied periods, mostly in the 1690s. It was long the practice, then, that the high court independently revoked or confirmed death sentences, besides which the court had considerable freedom in the matter of whether or not to refer a death sentence to the King in Council at all. It was only in the last decade of the century and the era of absolutism, with kings claiming to be God’s representative judges on earth and gathering all legislative and judicial powers in their own persons, that this position of the high court was changed. In most of the years studied here, however, the high court was able on its own to decide on the death sentences referred to it. The most frequent outcome was that these sentences were revoked. In the first period of study, the number was particularly high: 849. The explanation for this is that the high court passed milder sentences than those prescribed in the Appendix for single adultery and minor cases of incestuous marriage on 582 occasions, and milder than those prescribed in the national law and the town law for petty thefts on 212 occasions. This led to the issue of a new penal ordinance in 1653, which rescinded the severe punishments prescribed both in the Appendix and in the native laws. Despite this, the number of confirmed death sentences in this period was as high as 160. Although so many death sentences were revoked, this does not alter the fact that the penal systemallowed an average of one person to be executed every month for ten years somewhere in Småland or Oland. The analysis
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