213 nothing was said about amnesty (i.e. a general act of mercy) and abolition (interruption of criminal investigation or proceedings). Such decisions were, according to the Court, an aspect of sovereignty, as an implied prerogative power not expressly laid down by the Constitution and based on political considerations. Thus, the Court declined to give its opinion on questions of amnesty and abolition. Under the Constitution of 1974, the prerogative of mercy includes not only pardon, but also amnesty and abolition. At the same time, the Court was relieved of the function of examining applications for pardon, unless the Government so requests (less than once a year, out of some 2,000 applications). During the period 1850—1920, the individual Justices often gave very different opinions in matters of pardon, e.g. concerning the conversion of a death sentence. During the period 1850-1921 (when capital punishment was abolished in peace time), the death penalty was carried out on 86 persons, but only one person has been executed in Sweden after 1900, in 1910. Under the Constitution of 1974, the death penalty was totally abolished. In 1909 a new Supreme Adminstrative Court was created to take care of appeals against administrative decisions, some of which had earlier been examined by the Supreme Court. The heavy burden of reviewof draft legislation was at the same time transferred from the Supreme Court to a new independant advisory committee, the Law Council, composed of three Justices, two from the Supreme Court and one from the Supreme Adminstrative Court. Heavy restrictions were imposed at the end of the period 1850-1920 to spare the Court fromexamining cases of no major importance. After the end of this period, the possibilities to appeal to the Court were further restricted, in 1945, 1971 and 1981 and other amendments will soon be adopted. All these changes have been introduced in line with the desire of the Justices to concentrate their time on cases of value as precedents, in order to give guidelines to the lower courts, and indications to the legislature regarding the need for amendments of legislation. By transforming the Supreme Court to try primarily such cases, the need for oral hearings (the procedure of the Court was purely written before 1948) will decrease and the Court will run the risk of ending up working in a vacuum. At the same time the Prosecutor-General has to accept a wider responsibility for the types of cases, involving unsolved interpretative difficulties, to be presented to the Supreme Court. Looking at the recruitment to the Supreme Court in the period 1850-1920 we find a suprisingly large number of Justices with doctorates and many with experience of academic teaching. Today such a background is rare and so is recruitment from the bar. The experience of a Supreme Court Justice is nowadays generally limited to the bench interspersed with work in Government ministries, together with work in preparatory legislative committees. This has given the Court homogeneity and the Justices a feeling of solidarity with the lower judiciary and with the public administration and, thus, unconsciously, to its political base. Very fewof theJustices appointed to the Court nowadays have been politically active before, and those who were tend not to continue their participation in political life. By contrast, in the period 1850-1920, many Justices had been Cabinet members, mostly as legal experts without a ministry. Some left the Court to join the Government and returned later to the Court, while a number preferred to accept other high public positions. None of the Justices within this period showed any sympathy for the left wing political parties. Nonetheless, although they were all conservative or liberal, a few of them demonstrate in their voting and opinions an increasing understanding for the antireligious, anti-royalistic, anti-military and even purely socialist movements in the Sweden of the time.
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