Barna Attila: Lőcsei Fehér Asszony. Legenda és valóság - Győri Tanulmányok Füzetek. Tudományos Közlemények 16/2014 (Győr, 2014)

Lőcse’s White Lady and her lawsuit of high treason (Summary)

Voreign language summary

the proposal and in his decree of May, ordered the court to apply violent interrogation and form the final decision in its light.

However, Hungarian legislature does not allow, or rather let me rephrase it - it depends on wording — does not regulate the devices of torture. The continuance of the court procedure was mainly due to the circumstance that some judges questioned the possibility whether nobles, moreover, noble women should be tortured. They proposed the procedure's abandonment, or, if it was even then ordered by the ruler, they asked about its severity and degree. The head of royal legal affairs (casarum regalium director) was upon the opinion that legislature does not prohibit the torture of nobles either (other sources mention women) and in the concrete case, its lighter degree has to be applied.

Those who were against it cited István Werbőczi's law book, Tripartitum of 1514, which exclusively prohibited the torture of nobles in case of town court forums. In Hungarian Parliaments the orders did not form laws regarding torture in the following centuries after the Tripartitum either, however, common law had long ago knew this method of procedural law. Hungary did not have a complex penalty code or legal code at that time, however, from the second half of the 17th century the possibility of taking over the penalty and procedural code published by Ferdinand III in 1656 for Lower-Austria was on the agenda. This regulated the application and degree of strict torture in detail. At the end, the code was never introduced in the Hungarian Kingdom but it was translated to Latin and certain law collections contained the wording of the Austrian legal code as an appendix. The law attached as an appendix, was continuously built into the practice of Hungarian penalty courts under the name of Praxis criminalis and several of its regulations were accepted as a sample by Hungarian authorities.

Finally, Chancellor Illésházy, then the Emperor himself, being angry regarding the failure of the decision, ordered the torture of the woman in prison in September. They argued that if there was no such legal paragraph which allows it, they neither knew of one which prohibited it. The final decision matched with the proposal of the accusation, Mrs. Korponay was sentenced to capital punishment and the loss of cattle and her torture was ordered.

With the court's decision, 22nd September 1714 was set as the day of torture. Two members of the court were present, plus the attorney. Júlia Géczy did not confess more than she confessed at the beginning of the trial, not even through terrible pain. Her interrogators did not use torture with fire, but hanging with twisted body part could not be avoided.-92-