Despre tâlhărie într-un document de la începutul secolului al XIX-lea
About robbery in a document from the early 19th century

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we present a typical case of “organized crime”, contained in an anafora from the 9th of May 1801. This was a report written by the Divan or by the Prince’s delegates on administrative or judicial problems, through which they inform the Prince about the result of a research, proposing a solution. Official documents that attempt to regulate punishments for thieves and a better coordination of local and central authorities to control crime provide very useful information for identifying this social phenomenon at the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. We present in this paper a small fragment of the way the criminal justice functioned in Moldova, through a research report prepared by three landowner judges making up the court in 1801, on several thefts committed by four defendants, accused of robbery. The document is found in the National Archives of Iaşi, the Criminal Court fund. Research is very thorough, based both on the testimony of witnesses and injured parties and also on the statements obtained from the culprits especially after the application of beating, corporal punishment often used in the 19th century. The perpetrators were sentenced to death by hanging, punishment carried out in other similar cases, as proved by other documents found in the same archive. However, for serious crimes capital punishment was losing ground in front of other punitive measures, mostly the confinement in "the salt pit".

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