The 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina withheld torture once full proof already stood, confining the mechanism to the half-proof gap

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The Holy Roman Empire's 1532 criminal-procedure code, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, draws a boundary condition that tests whether torture was purpose-built for the half-proof gap rather than a general punitive tool. Article 69 addresses a suspect against whom full proof (typically two credible witnesses) already stood, but who still refused to confess: "he shall nonetheless be condemned on account of the proven crime without any examination under torture." The article's fuller text has the magistrate first declare the crime proven and only then observe that, "notwithstanding" continued denial, no torture follows — the confession, and the coercion used to extract one, had become legally unnecessary once full proof existed on its own.

This directly narrows the claim in claim-medieval-judicial-torture-required-a-half-proof-and-produced-the-completing-confession from "torture required at least a half-proof" to something sharper: torture was licensed only in the specific evidentiary gap between one witness (or equivalent circumstantial indicia — a half-proof, claim-roman-canon-law-rated-one-witness-equal-to-a-private-document) and two. Once full proof was independently established, the statute affirmatively bars the examination. The apparatus was not "suspicion licenses coercion" in general; it was keyed to a specific arithmetic shortfall, and the same code that permitted torture below the threshold forbade it above.