199 In the Koivuniemi case, neither one of the parties makes any allusion to the legal rules of evidence in their appeal letters, but rather typically argues for or against the credibility of the circumstantial evidence presented. Nor is there anything in the court decisions to suggest a viability of the statutory theory of proof. This goes both for the outcome of court proceedings - only acquittals and condemnations were used, not conditional acquittal or absolutio ah instantia — as well as for the grounds of the court decisions, where nothing seems to suggest the upholding of the legal evidence rules. The only exception to the virtual abandonment of legal evidence rules is represented by the minority opinion of Justice Gummerus in the final decision of the JDS. The majority of the court members involved did not think any more in terms of the statutory theory. However, had a case witha similar amount of evidence come up during the era of statutory theory, the courts would almost certainly not have released the accused completely, but he or she would have been sent to confessional imprisonment or at least only been released ah instantia. Convictions without Full Proof Was there something special about the criminality in the cases where, in the period of full proof, the accused ends up convicted even in the absence of statutory full proof? The question has to be answered negatively; as will be discussed in detail below, no significant change either in the quantity or quality of homicidal crime took place in the 1850s or 1860s - nor in the whole century, for that matter. The growth in the number of convictions without full proof consisted, however, of the same type of cases which most likely would have ended up in the intermediate decisional categories during the era of legal proof. Even before the 1850s, the cases without full legal proof did, to be sure, occasionally result in conviction; in these cases, however, remarkably strong circumstancial evidence was usually produced. In the second half of the century, this feature is no longer to be noticed, as even less cogent evidence is often seen to lead to conviction.5 In 1855, a murder case was tried at the Hundred Court of Lapua. An unknown wanderer had been found killed; the available evidence suggested that Wilhelm Andila had killed the victim, using a heavy wooden stick, on November 16, 1854. Wilhelmand his wife, who were proved to have been short of money, had seen the wanderer receive some at the Ojutkangas house on the day of the mur5 Obviously, a large part of the convictions without full proof still consisted of cases with very strong, although legally inadequate evidence. See, for example, the cases with one eyewitness such as Autio, pag. 274/1855; Klockars, pag. 382/1855; Eskola, pag. 418/1855; Luopajärvi, pag. 529/ 1860; Pirilä, pag. 29/1861; Riihinen, pag. 266/1865; Kupila, pag. 344/1865; and Flinck, pag. 23/ 1866. 14
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