ABSTRACT
Legally these were not cases of infanticide but commonplace murders of children. In the verbal statements of the court of appeal records the difference was, however, blurred by the many similarities in treatment. The Court of Appeal seems to have felt no need to separate infanticide from other murders of newborn children. Whereas the Turku Court of Appeal usually enforced the correct procedure, killing of children was one phenomenon which the court failed to categorize consistently according to relevant laws. There are numerous cases where the Court of Appeal sent a matter to be reinvestigated in the lower court because of ambiguities, and at times it fetched the lower court adjuncts to be reprimanded before the Court of Appeal.4 Therefore it is clear that even though the Turku Court of Appeal as well as the other Courts of Appeal in the realm often changed and commuted punishments, (So¨rlin, 1999, 63ff; Thunander 1993), it was still keen to supervise the procedures of lower courts. Yet in treating child murder vs. infanticide, the Court of Appeal was willing to appropriate its own procedures, as well as punishments. One reason for this may have been that child murder was a crime that simply ill fitted the criteria stipulated by the law (cf. also Kilday, 2007; Sharpe 1983).
