Atonement
Atonement is a term from legal history . It is an agreement between an offender and the victim side, in which the perpetrator promises, among other things, reparation for the offense committed and the victim side, in return, waives legal proceedings. Such a procedure was especially common before the inquisition process was introduced , since at that time criminal offenses were not yet prosecuted by the state and a private indictment in court was always required so that a criminal could be convicted of his act. Such an accusation, which entailed an “embarrassing punishment” for the perpetrator, was generally only attempted by the victim if an atonement was not reached. In earlier times, an atonement contract was often preceded by a feud that was instigated by the victim against the perpetrator.
Lore
Naturally, only written atonement agreements have been handed down. They were probably only closed in the case of manslaughter or murder, date from the 13th to 17th centuries and are often called manslaughter atonement contracts. If separate documents of atonement dominated in the past, only brief entries are made in the court books later.
Content and conclusion of contract
The content of the manslaughter contracts was mostly the promise of the perpetrator to repair part of the damage caused by fixed monetary payments. In addition, he committed himself to measures for the salvation of the deceased's soul, mostly to some pilgrimages, penitential services, candle donations and to erecting an atonement cross near the crime scene.
The atonement could be concluded through the mediation of a judge or out of court; the formal requirements were different. For example, the Sachsenspiegel (around 1230) explains the atonement and the original feud: “Sone adir orveide, to whom one does justice, one admitted with the judge and the two men. Added her si abir ane dishes, her muz added the same sighing, that is, the one that was tete de sone adir orvede. "
A complete atonement treaty has been received in Weikersheim from 1463 . For the murder of a son, the relatives and the perpetrator negotiated through two arbitrators as (customary) reparation: a stone cross , a Holy Mass with two priests, ten pounds of wax for candles, 45 guilders as expenses and compensation, a pair of trousers each arbitrators, the bailiff and the bailiff , and two buckets of wine to the followers of both parties.
Late Atonement Treaties
The coexistence of manslaughter and the inquisition process in later times is particularly interesting: many courts accepted the conclusion of an atonement contract and thereupon waived criminal charges. The town charter of Brixen (South Tyrol) from 1379 contained the following regulation: “The dead man, who coats in the court, is the master. If one dervies i [h] n, the i [h] n do, the judge shall judge dead against dead ..., hand against hand, fuoz against fuoz, eye against eye; and if one wants to take phenning [= money] for it, then he will do things with the person who is being damaged, so he next will. ” Legal books such as the Klagspiegel (around 1436) provided legal reasons why such an exception from the inquisition proceedings was permissible. Despite the nationwide introduction of the inquisition procedure (which had long been common in most territories) by the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina in 1532, the atonement procedure was able to persist in some areas into the 17th century.
See also
literature
- Paul Frauenstädt: Blood revenge and death penalty in the German Middle Ages. Leipzig 1881 ( online )
- Franz Beyerle : The development problem in the Germanic legal process, I. Atonement, revenge and surrender. In: Contributions under German law. Vol. X, H. 2, 1915.
- Gustav Adolf Kuhfahl : The old stone crosses in Saxony - A contribution to researching the stone cross problem. Dresden 1928.
- Wolfgang Leiser: Art. Stone Cross. In: Concise dictionary on German legal history. Volume 4. Schmidt, Berlin 1990, Sp. 1948f.
- Heiner Lück: On the emergence of embarrassing criminal law in Electoral Saxony - Genesis and alternatives. In: Rudolph Harriet, Helga Schnabel-Schüle (Ed.): Justiz = Justice = Justicia? Trier 2003, ISBN 3-89890-062-2 , pp. 271-286.
- Andreas Deutsch: Late Atonement - On the practical and legal classification of the manslaughter atonement contracts in the late Middle Ages and early modern times. In: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History . Germ. Abt. 122 (2005), pp. 113-149.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bernhard Losch: Stone crosses in Baden-Württemberg. Commission publisher Konrad Theiss, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 978-3806207545