different realities and reactions that the only way to end his suffering was to die. So during an seizure of insanity he killed the child of his neighbours that he loved much, so that he would be executed. He was not executed because the city physician Johann Theodor Pyl found him insane.472 The legislation focused on the impression given by the presence or absence of the priest at the site of execution. The idea was frequently put forward in Prussia that the penalty only consisted in the loss of life, and that the condemned therefore must be able to confess for her priest.473 Less than twenty years after the ordinance, in 1786, a proposed legislation suggested other means to deal with these kinds of murder. Murder committed in a situation of ordinary desperation would be dealt with just as any other murder, and the mode of execution would be chosen according to the circumstances. Murderers that had committed their murders as a result of a religiously founded urge to be executed would not be executed. Instead, such a murderer would be imprisoned for life in narrow confinement, chained and, at set intervals, be subjected to corporal punishment.474 Already at this time some such murders in Prussia in reality resulted in prison sentences, normally for life.475 Johanna Susanne Ibischin in 1791 had murdered a child because both of her weariness of life and of a wish for revenge on a man that had jilted her after promising marriage. She was first sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment with corporal punishment on every anniversary of the murder.476 The later legislation largely followed the proposal. In theAllgemeines Landrecht 1794 it was prescribed that those committing murders on those grounds would not be executed. The penalty was to be imprisonment for life and also to regularly be subjected to publicly administrated corporal punishment.477 The law was soon applied. January 472 Gnothi sauthon 1783 I:1:26 sqq, Baumann 2001 p 77 sq. 473 Abegg 1996 p 339 sq. 474 Entwurf 1984 p333I:III:VIII:X§§ 690–692. § 691: ”Ist aber ausgemittelt, daß jemand, bey sonst ungestörtem Gebrauch seines Verstandes, aus Schwärmerey, und in der Absicht, hingerichtet zu werden, einen Todschlag begangen, so soll derselbe zwar seinen Enzweck nicht erreichen”. See also Berlinische Monatsschrift 1789 p 536. 475 Weber 1937 p 165 sq. 476 Rehse 2008 p 401 sqq. 138
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