196 the number of convictions in cases without full proof that begins to grow sharply soon after the middle of the century. In our material, the first sample year where this is clearly noticed is 1855. Undoubtedly, the bipolarization of the decisional types and the consequent practical falling into desuetude of the intermediate decisional types is an important step towards the free evaluation of evidence. It is a recurrent theme in this study that major changes in procedural law normally take a long time to unfold. Just as the legal theory of proof in fact contained much free evaluation of evidence, so free evaluation of evidence, at its initial stage as the leading theory of evidence, continued to carry with it remnants of the past. Therefore, the crucial question for the student of the change in evidential theories is to decide when free evaluation of evidence came to prevail over the old law of proof. Although the change fromone theory to another was gradual, a clearly noticeable break can be discerned soon after the middle of the 1800s, and that discontinuation is surprisingly clear. As courts began to evaluate all evidence as a totality and as circumstantial evidence rose in value, all that mattered was whether the evidence produced what in French and German was called an “intime conviction” or a “Totaleindruck In the following, I will approach the law of proof using the same basic method as in the previous chapter. Thus, I will consider only to a very limited extent the cases where legal proof was presented; instead, it is the cases short of full proof that lie at the focal point of my interest. I will not go through the technicalities of confession and witness evidence in detail as I did regarding the period of legal proof. This is because the free evaluation of evidence did not advance through a further interpretative extention of those categories; the interpretations developed in the previous decades persisted. Instead, the new conception of proof progressed through the rooting out of the intermediate categories of proof. In the first half of the century, the cases without full proof that resulted in conviction usually carried very strong circumstantial evidence, such as one eyewitness, or one or more oathless eyewitnesses. As we shall see, beginning in the 1850s cases with less strong circumstantial evidence began increasingly to be admitted into the category of convictions, with the result of a gradual falling into oblivion of the intermediate categories of decision. Categories of Full Proof: Confessions and Witnesses Above, I have shown how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the legal categories of full proof - confession and eyewitnesses - were interpreted permissevely and against the interests of the accused. The rules concerning the burden of proof made the accused responsible for showing that he or she had acted in self-defence. Furthermore, the accused’s recantation of his or her con-
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