Strafprocessen tegen een dood lichaam

Juridische procedures wegens zelfdoding in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw

Samenvatting

Criminal Trials Against a Dead Body: Legal Proceedings over Suicide in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

For centuries, committing suicide was considered a criminal offence of a very serious nature. One who had taken his own life was said to have committed a crime against God, a so-called crimen laesae majestatis divinae. For this foul deed, the deceased had to be punished. His body had to be thrown out of the window, it had to be dragged to the field of gallows outside the city, and there it had to be hanged upside down or exposed on a wheel or buried beneath the gallows. From around 1500 onwards, these punitive measures were restricted – more and more – to cases in which the suicide was committed in order to escape criminal justice. Suicidal behaviour was eventually decriminalized by the beginning of the 19th century, when criminal law was moderated and codified. This modernization of criminal law was, for a major part, the result of the efforts of the Italian lawyer Cesare Beccaria, who had published a treatise on crime and punishment – Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) – in which he propagated that criminal law should be in accordance with human ratio. Punishing the corpse of a dead person is as useless as it is irrational.