195 13. The Years of Transformation: Towards Free Evaluation of Evidence Historical periodization is always difficult, and it becomes particularly demanding when it has to do with drawing boundaries between developmental stages of judicial practice. Court practice, especially when one is dealing with evidentiary rules, changes slowly: it normally takes a long time for innovations to completely replace old forms of decision-making. As regards gradual changes of procedural practice, assessing exactly when there is a shift fromone era to another is bound to be slightly arbitrary. When observed carefully enough, rules of proof are always more or less under transformation; therefore, most periodizations involve a certain degree of simplification and generalization. That does not, however, alter the fact that a crucial change did take place in the Finnish law of proof in the nineteenth century. If we are to understand that transformation, we need to pin its essential elements down to as limited a period as we can. The years immediately following the middle of the century saw an increased uneasiness over which theory of proof was to be followed. As we have seen above, legal rules of proof were far from being strictly followed even before the 1850s; lower courts, especially, but also the high courts and the JDS assumed what can conveniently be called a practical attitude toward the rules of proof. Inthe 1850s and 1860s, however, there was a marked change in the practice of the high courts and theJDS. In those decades and compared to the first half of the century, there was a rapid increase in the number of convictions made by the upper instances in homicide cases in which less than legal full proof was present. Parallel with this development, the frequency with which higher courts took recourse to intermediary decisions declined remarkably: the categorical system of the legal theory of proof polarized around the two decisional categories of a liberal Rechtsstaat, acquittal and, mainly, conviction. Since lower courts already followed this practice before, the Finnish court practice, as far as the lawof proof is regarded, became uniform. Uniformity of the legal practice, again, implies modernity; with modern law, differing court practices are rooted out. In the Finnish law of proof, modernization in this sense occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. In comparison to the period of legal proof — the first half of the nineteenth century -, the period beginning in the 1850s and 1860s thus bears a remarkably distinct profile. As compared to the earlier time, when the typical feature of the evaluation of evidence was that the court decisions spread out between the different decision types roughly according to the amount of proof at hand, the courts of the 1850s and 1860s and onwards tended less and less to make use of the intermediary decision types regarding cases without full proof. There are somewhat more decisions for acquittal during this period, but it is especially
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