Döden inför folkets ögon - En rättshistorisk studie av dödsstraffets offentliga verkställighet under 1800-talet fram till 1877 års reform

Sammanfattning

Through the reform of 1877, the public execution of the death penalty was abolished in Sweden. Until then, execution had long constituted a public penal practice in which the death sentence was carried out before a present audience. Publicity was not merely an external form of execution, but part of the way in which punishment was justified, communicated, and expected to take effect. This thesis aims to examine how the public execution of the death penalty was justified, questioned, and ultimately abolished in relation to changing conceptions of the function and legitimacy of punishment. The study shows that public execution long formed an integral part of the older Swedish penal system. Public execution was a public, communicative, and legitimacy-bearing penal practice, in which the effect of punishment was assumed to depend on its visibility. Publicity was long justified through ideas of deterrence, moral instruction, religious preparation, and state authority. During the nineteenth century, however, this understanding gradually came to be reconsidered. The same publicity that had previously been regarded as necessary for the effect of punishment instead began to be perceived as something that could undermine it. Through its public character, the execution risked arousing sympathy for the condemned, provoking curiosity and moral hardening among the audience, giving rise to martyr-like conceptions, superstition, and distrust of the administration of justice. As public execution was placed in relation to new social, penal-theoretical, and humanitarian ideas, its function began to appear increasingly uncertain. This gave rise to a shift from publicity as a precondition for the effect of punishment to publicity as a threat to the function and legitimacy of punishment. The study also shows that the question of abolishing public execution was long subordinated to the broader question of the continued existence of the death penalty. Since the death penalty was repeatedly presented as a form of punishment in decline, the forms of its execution were not always considered to require independent examination. At the same time, when the question of publicity was eventually treated more independently, it still continued to be assessed to a large extent in relation to the death penalty as such. The question of publicity was therefore never fully detached from the question of the death penalty’s legitimacy, but came to function as part of the broader reconsideration of that form of punishment. Finally, the study shows that the reform of 1877 should be understood as more than a change in the external form of execution. The reform marked a final stage in a longer process of legal-cultural change, in which public exposure and bodily suffering were increasingly perceived as difficult to reconcile with a modern and legitimate penal system. The abolition of public execution thereby expressed a deeper shift in understandings of the function of punishment, the penal power of the state, and the forms of suffering that could be justified in the name of punishment.