200 der. The day after the murder, Wilhelmwas seen with a considerable amount of money; however, he could not explain where it had originated. There were, furthermore, footprints leading from the Ojutkangas house to the site of the killing; the footprints matched Wilhelm’s boots. In addition to all this, the victim had said, before dying that it had been “the fellow from the Ojutkangas house” that had hit him. Against Wilhelm Andila’s persistent denial, all instances convicted him(the Hundred Court of Lapua, February 27, 1855; the High Court of Vaasa, April 4, 1855; theJDS, August 16, 1855).^ In the case of Tomas Annasson of Luhanka, the accused was charged of the murder and robbery of Matilda Nygrén. The accused had resided at the Nygréns at the end of December, 1874; Matilda’s husband Fredrik Nygrén had been away from home. It was established that Matilda must have been killed on the night between the December 29 and 30. The only steps that were found in the snow leading to the Nygréns were the victim’s and the accused’s. The accused denied the charges, claiming that he had left the house on the morning of the 29th. He could not, however, provide evidence for this. On December 30, the accused was found lavishly spending money that he did not have a day before and in possession of things that, according to several witnesses, belonged to the victimand her husband. The accused, again, could offer no plausible explanation for this. Tomas Annasson was sentenced to death by the Hundred Court of Tuusula (August 4, 1875) and by the High Court of Turku (October 5, 1875); the sentence was commuted to banishment to Siberia by the emperor (the JDS, July 14, 1876).7 The Disappearance of the Intermediate Categories: Where Did They Go? Hence, an obvious, not to say striking change can be observed in the Finnish law of proof shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. The courts began less and less to employ the intermediate decisional alternatives; instead, they relied more and more on the two basic choices of the modern law of proof, acquittal and conviction. When comparing the 1850s and the 1860s, the change seems, in fact, abrupt. Gradually, the few cases of intermediate decisions still found in the material of 1860 and 1870 almost completely disappear by the end of the century. Although isolated cases of intermediate decisions still turn up in the lower court practice as late as the 1890s, the basic pattern clearly emerges. Hence, in the 1850s and 1860s the legal theory of proof suffered a major blow. The theories had switched places; the former main rule, the legal theory of proof, had become an exception; free evaluation of evidence had now taken its place as the main theory of evidence. Having practically fallen ^ Andila, pag. 186/1855. ^ Annasson, pag. 424/1875; see also Kaipainen, pag. 155/1856; Seppälä, pag. 280/1864; Tyni, pag. 289/1864; Knuuttila, pag. 331/1864; Isaksson, pag. 211/1865; Wiita, pag. 215/1865; Ericsson, pag. 287/1865; Jumisko, pag. 530/1865; Pörnull, 22/1866; Koltto, pag. 38/1875; Luukko, pag. 141/ 1875; Sand, pag. 427/1875; Enqvist, pag. 42/1880; and Mellangård, pag. 273/1880.
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