136 unconditional legal rules, to bind the courts to the truth and to law, and instead let it depend on the judge’s evaluation, based on his reliability and discernment, as to what extent the evidence brought forth in each case has or lacks credibility; but nevertheless not to leave the judge without all rules of proof and thus to show greater trust towards the mentioned qualities of the judge than w'hat possibly would be appropriate for the normal and certain administration of the law.”^ For Lindblad, the model was the Anglo-Saxon system, and not, for instance, the negative theory of proof which had been the midway choice of Feuerbach. As in the Anglo-Saxon system, juries were to be established with certain rules of proof serving as “lead and measurement” (“ledning och måttstock”).!^ Thus no revolution in legislation or legal literature occurred in the first half of the century. Nevertheless, Inger’s studies show that a change was, in fact, underway, but it was taking place in the courts. In less serious cases, such as theft, lower courts seem already to have regarded circumstantial evidence as full proof in the 1830s. According to Inger, the quantity of decisions based on circumstantial evidence alone rises in the hundred courts in the 1850s, although in general, and still in the first decades of the 1900s, the city courts seem to have been more eager to depart fromthe legal rules of proof." Furthermore, there is a difference between the lower courts and the high courts; as in Finland, the high courts applied the rules of proof more strictly than did the city courts and the hundred courts.'- As for the Supreme Court, in 1834 it convicted an accused on one witness and indicia. In 1858, the highest instance made convictions twice for theft and once for monev falsification on circumstantial evidence alone. In 1871, the Supreme Court went as far as to convict a person for murder on circumstantial evidence alone. The accused was sentenced, after a vote, to a kind oipoena extraordinaria (forced labor for life instead of capital punishment). It was not until 1910 that the Supreme Court sentenced a person to death on circumstantial evidence alone. In the 1860s, the debate on the procedural reformarose again. In 1864, Justice Christian Naumann wrote in his legal journal an article that was primarily directed against confessional imprisonment. Naumann did not attack the legal theory of proof as such, although he did admit the need of a limited procedural Lindblad 1842 pp. 58-59. /l^id. pp. 45-46. ” Inger 1994 p. 266. Ibid. pp. 267-268; Hemming-Sjöberg 1931 p. 263. See Inger 1994 pp. 268-629. In itself, it is interesting to note that the decisive steps taken by the Swedish Supreme Court towards free evaluation of evidence should he recorded with such exactitude. The fact that the corresponding data are not a common place for the historians of the JDS marks the lowprofile that the highest court instance had in Finland: the decisions of the JDS simply did not enjoy the same precedential value nor were they divulgated with the same efficiency as the decisions of Sweden’s Supreme Court.
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