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314
III. CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION.
been guilty of crimes involving severer penalties than three months’ hai
labour, six months’ imprisonment, or a fine which it may be concludf
the delinquent will be compelled to discharge by serving a term in gac
Full responsibility with respect to criminal acts commences at the age i
fifteen, but for those between the ages of fifteen and eighteen a speci
scale of reduced punishments is applicable. Mental disease and aberratic
of mind incurred through no fault of the agent are furthermore ground
under certain circumstances, for a declaration either of mental incapacit
or of enfeebled mental power, involving in the latter case a diminutic
of penalty.
Attempts at, and preparations for, the committal of crime are dealt wit
by the Swedish law far less rigorously than is the case in most legal sy,
tems abroad. Complicity in crime (instigation and aiding and abetting
is regarded as a phenomenon accessory to the act of the perpetrator of tl
crime and acquires its special character from its relationship to that ac
Previous conviction in certain types of crime (larceny, robbery, and oth(
such breaches within the scope of the general criminal code) involves a
increase of penalty, though that is not the case, save in rare exception
respecting professional or habitual criminals as such.
In the various categories of crime there comes out very strikingly tl
importance attaching, in respect to the magnitude of the penalty, to tl
degree of the effect, that the criminal act may have produced, even thoug
that was never contemplated by the perpetrator himself or can rightl
be set down as his deed. A case of outrage on the person done of malic
prepense that results in the victim’s death, is thus punished much moi
severely than any such outrage that only occasions bodily injury, tli
latter type of outrage being moreover punished differently according t
the degree of severity of the injury produced.
The clauses of the Swedish criminal code contain no such subdivision of tl
crimes into more and less serious offences, as is common in foreign crimin
codes. The occurrence of one or another penal stipulation in the general crir
inal code, or in any other statute, cannot either be considered as based upc
any special principle. In the criminal code offences are enumerated that pa
take of the nature of so-called police-court or petty misdemeanours, just as (
the other hand stipulations respecting actual crimes are to be met with outsii
the pages of that code (e. g. the penalties imposed for usury, which are er
bodied in a special law relating to that type of offence).
In the criminal code the various crimes are enumerated (with the exceptic
of administrative errors, which form a chapter by themselves) in eighteen cha
ters, each of which as a rule has some central object against which the crimin
acts dealt with in that chapter are directed. Thus among offences against tl
person those involving an infringement of the sanctity of the individual foT
one chapter, those that constitute a restriction of his liberty another, tho
affecting his honour a third. Of encroachments upon another person’s proper
those involving damage, theft, robbery, destruction, and bankruptcy offences a
treated in separate chapters. The offences against the public at large are su
divided into chapters, three of them dealing respectively with: Wrongs done
Public Authorities, Perjury, Forgery.
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