Significant for Sweden is how clearly much of the development is related to the experience from practice and from real cases. Already in the 1690’s it was usual in Sweden that those condemned to death at least for theft in order to engineer their own executions were reprieved to other punishments so that their wishes should not be fulfilled.540 The number of actions and confessions in order to be executed resulted in the Swedish law of 1734 ruling a false confession in order to obtain execution to be punished as an attempted suicide.541 In 1741 the danger of pomp and ceremony at the execution of women that had murdered children was called attention to by Erik Alstrin, then pastor primarius in Stockholm and in 1742 bishop in Växjö, in a debate in the house of priests of the Swedish diet.542 No direct connection, however, existed between this debate and aRoyal ordinance of December 12th 1741 restricting pomp at and near executions and especially prohibited the use of special clothing for the condemned prisoner.543 The ordinance instead reflected a crisis that had occurred in 1740 in Stockholm. In November that year a woman was executed for a murder she had committed in order to be executed. Then in December, two women, independently of each other, had murdered infant girls they were not related to. One of them had seen the November execution. Svea Hovrätt, one of the appellate courts of Sweden, understanding that these murders were not isolated incidents, wrote to the government stating that several murderers of the children of others had confessed that, when seeing the execution of a well prepared delinquent they resolved to die in the same way. The court also reported that executions for such crimes often soon were followed by more murders or other serious crimes. Some of the judges of the court suggested that those condemned for serious crimes should not only be prohibited to use any other clothes than their comSweden different realities and reactions 540 Wedberg 1944 p 117. 541 MB13:5, Inger 1994 p 86. 542 RDPr 1740–41 p 113. 543 Kongl. Maj:ts Förordning s a. 155
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