ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the legal framework that established the capital crimes from two angles. It identifies the legal provisions in the form they appeared in the Penal Codes and all the subsequent laws that amended them. The chapter analyses the way they were presented to the public at large through commented and annotated versions of the Penal Code. It views the legal provisions from an evolutionary perspective, to track all the changes, both in the number of capital crimes and their content, as they occurred from 1969 to 1989. The chapter contextualizes the penal policies with reference to the larger political framework and the eventual direct political interferences as they result from documents like Securitate reports. The propagandistic use was centred on the publicity of the legal provisions and not on particular cases, except for a bank robbery case which was presented to a limited audience.
