Murder cases in the legal practice of the Supreme Tribunal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the second half of 18th century

Abstract

The article analyses the punishments that were imposed by the most important court of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – the Supreme Tribunal – in the second half of the 18th century on the people who were sentenced for committing premeditated murders. The aim of the analysis was to disclose to what extent the judicial practice was based on the working legal acts and what was the influence of the ideas of philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment in the area of the criminal law. The Supreme Court in the second half of the 18th c. judged almost thirty of such cases; only two of them were judged in the Court of the First Instance and the rest in the Court of Appeal Instance. Until the beginning of the last decade of the 18th c., murderers were administered the death sentence provided for in the third Statute of Lithuania and supplementary laws (particularly of 1726). There occurred two exceptions: 1) in 1766 the soldier Jerzy Kwiatkowski was exempted from the death sentence most probably because of the low social status of the murdered (the victim was a mentally disrupted Jewish girl); 2) in 1776, Stanisław Gzowski (accused of the murder of Zofia Scypionówna) was exempted from the death sentence because, while waiting for the hearing of the case, he had been imprisoned for four years and for most of the time chained. There are no doubts that in both cases the judgments, contrary to the law, were determined by the position taken by the influential people. In the judgements made by the Supreme Court in 1790–1792, one can already see a manifestation of the ideas of philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, as more and more frequently the murderers, instead of the death sentence, received life imprisonment. This was quite problematic as the laws did not provide for this kind of punishment; besides, the mechanism of escorting the sentenced to the prison which usually was on the outskirts of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations did not function in practice. However, these kinds of judgements were an important indication of the changes taking place in the outlook of the Supreme Court judges and the noblemen society.