213 Fromthe point of view of the modernization of criminal law the reforms of 1866, on the contrary, were extremely significant. In that year, a partial criminal law reform, containing five statutes, was passed. The statutes entered into force on January 1, 1870, and they introduced into the criminal sanction system, among other things, structural novelties of classical criminal law that a couple of decades later - with the Criminal Code of 1889 - were to extend to the whole system. The scope of the death penalty and corporal sanctions was reduced; instead, a systemof latitudes within which the court was to reach its decision was introduced, and, correspondingly, three different degrees of culpability (intentional, negligent, accidental) established. Furthermore, the new statutes rendered the system more lenient than the harsh sanctions of the Law of 1734. The ideas of the reforms of 1866 were, in a way, driven to their logical conclusion in the Criminal Code of 1889, which entered into force in 1894: the main sanctit')ns were hardened imprisonment, imprisonment (both based on a systemof latitudes) and fines. Fromnow on, the death sentence was possible only for murder and certain crimes against the state. For the judge, the statutes of 1866 and the Criminal Code of 1889 meant remarkably more leeway in sentencing. Whereas before they had been, in principie, tied to a fixed sentence, the judges were nowgiven a wider scale to employ. What kind of an effect did classical criminal law have on the law of proof? What was the relation between the two? Before an answer is attempted, it should be borne in mind that the Criminal Code of 1889 only ratified certain developments that already had been established in legal practice during the preceding decades. Although formally the death sentence only nowlost its importance, the death penalty had not been enforced since 1826. However, a systemsimilar to that of punishment scales had probably already developed as part of the leutcration svstem. When the high courts, practicing leuteration, departed fromthe sentences established by statute, they used the same kind of reasons (such as the young age of the wrong-doer) that would later cause the sentence to be meted out on the lower end of the punishment scale. In the latter system, these reasons came to be called mitigating factors.-' As a legal institution, IcHteration was abolished by the Criminal Code of 1889.22 More than being the beginning of a newera, therefore, the Criminal Code of 1889 was the end of an old one.2^ As far as criminal sanctions in the nineteenth-century legal practice are concerned, it has been shown convincinglv that the year 1870, when the statutes of Lappi-Soppälä 1982; Kekkonen 1991 pp. 264-265. Even a quick look into the Icutcration records {Lcuterationsböckcr) of the high courts seems to confirmthis hypothesis which I owe to Heikki Ylikangas; however, a thorough study of those sources has not been possible for this study. -- Blomstedt 1964 p. 495; Mvhrberg 1978 p. 61. Unfortunately, no systematic studies on Icutcration in the nineteenth-centurs' Finnish legal practice exist. Lappi-Seppala 1982 p. 140.
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