Titel: Lynching in Sweden
Skrivet av: Jojje Lintrup skrivet 1999-07-01, 22:35
According to the Swedish National Encyclopaedia, death penalty became popular at late Middle Ages, and meant decapitating (honourable), or hanging (dishonourable). The punishment became accentuated by tortures, or mutilating, at the time of the execution, and was called qualified death penalty. The most horrible methods of using qualified death penalty, was to stone the victim, to burn or to bury it alive. Sometimes they even got skinned, or had their bones shattered. alive of course! [As a curiosity I can mention, that King Charles IX:th favourite, Jöran Persson, got a real cruel punishment, when he became ex favourite. First he got his ears cut far into the head, then hanged by his waist to be spitted at by the people, then stretched between four poles, then he got the bones of his arms and legs shattered, and finally, he got his breastbone crushed, before the king admitted him (still in full consciousness) to get the mercy of death by decapitation.] But as Sweden was a civilised country, the most common way to humiliate the victim, and absolutely a way to fright the very religious public, was to punish the already dead body. The men were chopped into five-six pieces and left on a wagon wheel, high up in the air, where the ravens and craws could have a nice fresh meal, and the women where burnt in a big fire. As they never were buried at the graveyard, the punishment followed them into eternity. At the XVI:th and XVII:th centuries, there was a Dark Age of this country, and the death penalty became a common solution to solve many crimes. King Charles IX of Sweden, provided that the Law of Moses should be the model of the Swedish tribunals, but qualified death penalties became less common. Some year's later higher courts gradually started to reprieve capital punishments judged by lower courts. The national law of 1734 stipulated death sentence for 68 different crimes (e.g. adultery, sorcery, sodomy, blasphemy, treachery, abuse against the king and the authorities, mutiny, homicide, arson, rape, etc.). But rather soon King Gustaf III, influenced by Beccaria and the Age of Enlightenment, abolished death penalty for about ten of those crimes. As soon as the 1830:s the Royal Committee of Laws suggested the final abolition of capital punishment in Sweden, but it took 90 years of political discussions to do it. Mean time it was practised until 1910 when the last victim (Alfred Ander) was executed. Execution by a firing squad was stipulated as capital punishment at war times until 1972 (!), but 1976 death penalty was definitively prohibited according the Swedish Constitution.