Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

The Swedish judicial system has roughly developed as follows:
- Law-making. In the Middle Ages it was the king who made the laws. With time, however, the king got
less and less involved, although he up to the 1974 was the one who formally took decisions. In 1809,
Sweden got a new constitution that divided the power between the king and the parliament. In addition, a
Parliamentary Ombudsmanwas introduced that would help individual citizens if necessary, to start an
action against the state. The Supreme Court was established in 1789 when an organization for legal
review of new legislative proposals was founded. 1909 a council took over the Supreme Courts work to
review the proposed laws.
- Courts. Adjudication was until 1965 a local affair for the cities, initially run by the congregation of
townspeople who decided. But over time, special assemblies for different types of trials emerged. In the
Middle Ages, the state's role in this was that the king constituted the last instance in the appeal of a
judgment. The king therefore traveled around the country and sentenced. It gradually became
unsustainable and in the 1600s state courts started (courts of appeal) that ruled in the king's place, the first
of these was the Svea Court of Appeal 1614 th . In the 1700s came the aforementioned Supreme Court. By
1974 the Supreme Court ceased to rule in the king's name. 1965 all local courts in the country were
nationalized and county courts were added in 1979.
- The police. Until 1965, police work was primarily a local/municipal matter. The state was engaged in part
through that the military, to the middle of the 1800s, helped in efforts to keep order in the cities.
Moreover, the state contributed with support functions to local police organizations.
- Prisons. In the Middle Ages people usually were convicted to shame penalties, fines, corporal
punishment, exile, or death. Real prisons did not exist, so the arrested and sentenced to prison had to sit in
the town hall, the city walls, or in some monasteries. Additionally people were locked into castles and
tower basements, or in underground burrows where the prisoners were lowered through a hole in the
floor.
The first prison was built in 1624, in Stockholm, and in the latter part of the 1800s a whole series of
prisons were built. 1857 the parliament decided that all those sentenced to prison and those sentenced to
hard labor for up to two years would be sitting in the cell, so in most of these new prisons, each inmate
had his own cell. 1892, a new parliamentary decision was taken that meant that everyone would sit the
first three years in the cell, then they would work.
1832 all corporal punishment besides the death penalty was abolished. In 1921 also the death penalty in
peacetime was abolished, in 1946 the insulation cell punishment was abolished, and the death penalty in
time of war was abolished in 1973.
To be a parent implies the exclusive right to form
someones personality!
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