158 “the clear letter of the statute” and against legal practice as well, Wrede rejects the notion that two witness statements constitute a minimumrequirement of full proof only and that it would depend, ultimately, on the judge’s discretion whether he consider the two statements as sufficient.For Wrede, the old law is, thus, repairable this way through a new interpretation; the statute needs to be by-passed and changed. For Wrede, various provisions of the PS contain, elements of free evaluation, however. If there are several witnesses (PS 17:29), it is up to the judge to “freely evaluate the witnesses’” credibility.Moreover, should the witnesses have acquired their knowledge of the evidentiary theme at different times (the situation described at PS 17:25), the judge is free to evaluate the worth of the statements. In doing this he has to followcertains norms. He must, thus, try to examine “to what extent a concurrence [between the statements] can be considered to occur.” This, again, depends on the fact to be proved. If it is a fact of a long duration, then clearly full proof can be produced by two witnesses whose statements do not concur timewise. If a singular fact is at stake, the situation is different. As to some crimes, most notably illegal sale of liquor, legal practice had somewhat deviated, however, from these basic rules: if two people had bought liquor at different times froman illegal salesperson, then full proof could, regardless of the lacking concurrence, be taken to be at hand.^^ One witness is good for a half proof only, and in the case in which a purgatory oath or complementary circumstantial evidence is not permitted, the fact to be proved must be considered unproven. Down to the very wording of the texts, the awkward doctrinal solutions adopted in Wrede’s first text on the law of proof of 1894, treated above, were carried over to his textbooks and to the writings of the small number of other Finnish scholars interested in the subject.Onlyafter the promulgation of the new Chapter 17 of the PS in 1948 did the legal literature completely abandon the legal rules of proof. In writing his views on the law of proof, Wrede’s difficulties did not thus lay at the ideological level; for him, as for his continental scholarly colleagues and his colleagues in the Finnish judiciary, it had been evident for decades that the statutory theory of proof had served its purpose and deserved to go. The problems were elsewhere, in the discrepancy between statutory law and legal pracIbid. p. 222. Ibid. p. 220. Ibid. pp. 220-222. Ibid. p. 222. As to when circumstantial evidence is allowed to complement a half proof remains unclear. See Wrede 1910; Wrede 1919 pp. 86-100, 176-190; and Wrede 1936 pp. 103-121, 215-233. Forsman 1896 p. 181-342; Granfelt 1908 pp. 19-21. The same contradiction is still present in Alanen’s article on witness statements (1928, pp. 315-321). See Tirkkonen 1949 pp. 21-29. 69
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