164 the way court records were composed, howthe statements were written down and how decisions were grounded. Court records construe reality, and the constructions change over time. The bulk of the case material studied in this work consists of roughly the homicide cases^ that reached theJudicial Department of the Senate in the years 1820-1900; in the sample, all the cases of every fifth year are included.''^ The case dossiers contain the decisions, protocols, and additional documents of both of the lower instances, a hundred court or a city court and a high court.*' Should one be aware of the possible bias produced by the fact that the point of departure in this study is the JDS, the highest instance? That should not be a great problem, for due to the gravity of crimes under inspection, a great number of the homicide cases reached the supreme instance anyway.More importantly, it is presumable that clear cases - the ones witha clearly sufficient or deficient amount of evidence - were the ones that were definitely decided by one of the lower instances, and that the complicated cases were more likely to be appealed all the way. For this study, the clear cases are of the least interest, since they offer the least information on the legal thinking behind them. Indeed, the legal problems involved in my case material practically always have to do with evidence. By homicide in this study I refer to murder (mord) and the different kinds of manslaughter (drdp). Cases of negligent killing (dödsvdllande) and infanticide {barnamord) are left out of the study. All of these were regulated in the MS of the Lawof 1734. In 1866, as discussed below, the systemchanged, mainly so that the border between murder and manslaughter was redrawn. In the Criminal Code of 1889, the system was reformed again; this time, however, no substantial changes were made into the system from the point of view of this study; it is mainly the names of the statutes that changed. The assembly of the case material has been undertaken so that, for every year included in the sample, I have gone through the registers of the Judicial Department of the Senate {anomns- ja valitusdiaarit, suplikdiarium). Among other things, all the appeals cases that reached the JDS are recorded in the register. The number of cases that I have gathered to represent a given year is not, however, exactly the same as the number of cases actually decided that year. This is because, in a given year, theJDS may have decided a case already registered the previous year; correspondingly, a case caught in my net through the studying of a register may actually have been decided the subsequent year. Since the number of the cases thus lost and the number of the additional cases gained roughly equal each other, this has no effect on the results. For reasons of efficiency, other approaches would have been unthinkable. The actual decisions of the JDS are found in a separate collection (Senaatin oikeusosaston päätöstaltiot); so are the records kept by the JDS {Senaatin oikeusosaston puhtaaksikirjoitetut pöytäkirjat). The former have always been consulted, the latter - for the scarcity of the information they contain - only occasionally. All the documents used in this study are to be found in the National Archives of Finland {Kansallisarkisto). ' ’ In the cases of absolutio ab instantia, the lower court file has usually been returned to the respective high court; they have not been researched. '2 Lars-Otto Backman’s study shows that 35% of all the homicide cases in the province of Southern Ostrobothnia in 1800—1849 reached the Supreme Court (or after 1809. the JDS). Backman 1989 p. 148.
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