A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 26. 1999 (Debrecen, 1999)
Tanulmányok - Nagy Sándor: A hajdúkerületi törvényszék büntető ítéletei a fellebbviteli bíróságok előtt 1757-1850
60 Nagy Sándor: A hajdúkerületi törvényszék büntető ítéletei... Sándor Nagy Death sentences by the Hajdú-District Court before the Courts of Appeal The right of appeal against sentences passed by the district courts was greatly limited even in the second half of the 18th century. To counterbalance this condition Queen Maria Theresa decreed in 1765 that capital punishment can only be executed with her previous consent. Such a consent, however, was rarely given since she exercised her legal prerogative of mercy and converted the death sentence, according to the severity of the crime, to longer or shorter imprisonment. The study discusses the judgement of appeals forwarded to the King’s Court of Appeal and the Septemviri Court of Appeal against the death penalties meted out by the Hajdú-District Court between 1793 and 1850. During the above-mentioned time the court sentenced altogether 45 persons to death. Twenty-three out of these were adopted by the King’s Court of Appeal and the Septemviri Court of Appeal. However, the monarch transformed, by his/her power of pardon, all the 23 definitive sentences to imprisonment. The capital punishment of 12 convicts was definitively mitigated by the King’s Court of Appeal to loss of liberty. Four capital punishments were approved by the King’s Court of Appeal but mitigated to imprisonment by the Septemviri Court of Appeal. Three defendants sentenced definitively to death were definitively acquitted by the King’s Court of Appeal. The appeals for pardon by 3 persons definitively sentenced to death were rejected by the monarch and these convicts were executed.
