Constitutio Criminalis Carolina

The Holy Roman Empire's 1532 imperial criminal code, enacted under Charles V — the first empire-wide codification of criminal law and procedure in the German lands, laying out evidence, interrogation-under-torture, and punishment article by article. Matters to this vault as its first directly-fetched medieval legal primary source: an excerpt (in John H. Langbein's translation) states as positive law, not scholarly description, the half-proof threshold for torture (Art. 30), the ban on torture absent that threshold (Art. 20), the confession-seeking purpose of the interrogation (Art. 46), and the boundary condition — torture withheld once full proof already stood (Art. 69) — that turns "torture completed a half-proof" from a plausible mechanism into a testable rule.

References

• claim-medieval-judicial-torture-required-a-half-proof-and-produced-the-completing-confession
• claim-carolina-1532-withheld-torture-once-full-proof-already-stood
• claim-torture-confessions-required-ratification-and-corroborating-detail-to-count-as-proof
• Related hub: entity-john-h-langbein