181 concerned was more faithful to the statutory theory of proof than it was in relation to homicide crimes. The reason for this seems evident enough. At the lower courts the pressure to convict for lesser crimes was not nearly as great as the strain to “do something” whenever a relatively rare incident of murder or manslaughter took place. It is understandable, then, that the new ideas of evidence shc)uld have advanced by way of serious criminality — it was in relation to those that problems of proof were considered and reconsidered at their most acute. Reading the lower court records one gains the impression that cases were seldombrought into courts without the necessary legal evidence; if they were, either the court freed the accused, used conditional acquittal, or convicted interpreting the legal requirement of proof loosely. Cases Short of Full Proof To reduce the rigidity of the legal theory of proof, as we saw above, the main categories of proof were interpreted flexibly. Thus, the requirement of concurrence between eyewitnesses was given a loose practical interpretation and qualified confessions were commonly accepted as full proof as well - in the lower instances very commonly, but in the upper courts, too. Yet it was not exclusively or even mainly through an interpretative widening of evidentiary categories that the free evaluation of proof advanced; as was shown above, these broad interpretations had already existed during the period of full proof. It could be assumed that, to remedy the practical shortcomings that the rigidity of the statutory theory brought with it, a more or less identical understanding of legal rules of proof had existed ever since the legal theory of proof had been adopted in Sweden and Finland. As I will seek to demonstrate further on, the abolition of legal rules of proof proceeded, however, in Finnish legal practice through an increasing tendency to accept circumstantial evidence {indicia) as full proof. Before moving on to that, we shall first see how circumstantial evidence was treated during the first half of the nineteenth century. To determine the weight of circumstantial evidence, it is necessary to take a look at cases in which no full proof in the statutory sense of the term- eyewitnesses or confession - was obtainable. Howdid the courts react? The Categories of Decision In the absence of full legal proof, did courts automatically acquit? The answer cannot be answered simply affirmatively or negatively. As we saw above in the comparative part (Chapters 1—4), ways of getting around the strictness of the legal theory of proof were developed, and the Swedish version of the theory was no exception to this tendency. Besides acquittal and conviction, courts had
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