166 being rather elementary and superficial when compared to the continental legislation and juristic writing, the parts on the law of proof in the Law of 1734 are themselves vague and obscure. Thus, much space is left for the legal practice to fill. Its failure to do so except to a limited and unsystematic extent can be explained by at least two factors. First, during the first half of the nineteenth century the Finnish lower court judiciary remained mostly without a legal education. Second, the JDS was a weak body'- and not capable of effectively guiding legal practice. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the legal practice was the disobedience of the lower courts regarding the legal rules of proof. It is as if two different practices existed, one for the lowcourts and another for the higher instances. Despite these reservations, I feel justified in including the first half of the 1800s in the period of legal proof. In this era, the high courts and the JDS rather consistently required full proof for conviction in cases of homicide. Consequently, they made frequent use of the intermediary decision types - conditional acquittal, ahsolutio ah instantia, and confessional imprisonment — in cases in which a certain amount of proof, although not a full one, was at hand. Moreover, the fact that the courts of first instance often departed from the statutory rules of proof cannot be attributed to the modern theory of free evaluation of proof; instead, the practice has historical roots of its own, owing mainly to the inability of the state organs to take a firmgrip on the local judicial organs before the end of the nineteenth century. In more than a hundred and fifty years after its reception, the statutory theory of proof had only partially made its way into the Swedish and Finnish lower court practice. Differences between Different Levels of Courts In numbers, the differences between the lower courts and the upper courts are evident. Out of the 250 cases in the sample years between 1820—1850, 161 were cases with full legal proof (“clear cases”); in all of them, all instances convicted. The rest (89 cases) were cases without full proof; in them neither a confession nor the two necessary eyewitnesses were produced. In these 89 cases, the decisions of the different levels of courts turned out as follows: According to Björne, Finland had no actual supreme court during the Autonomy. The position of the JDS was weakened by the fact that it was part of the Grand Duchy’s government, the Senate, and because its members were appointed for three-y'ear periods only. Björne 1991 p. 140; see also Björne 1990.
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