Animal trial
In legal history, an animal trial was the criminal trial of a non-human animal. Such trials are recorded as having taken place in Europe from the thirteenth century until the eighteenth. In modern times, it is considered in most criminal justice systems that non-human animals lack moral agency and so cannot be held culpable for an act. Historical animal trials Animals, including insects, faced the possibility of criminal charges for several centuries across many parts of Europe. The earliest extant record of an animal trial is often assumed to be found in the execution of a pig in 1266 at Fontenay-aux-Roses. Newer research, however, suggests that this reading might be mistaken and no trial took place in that particular incident. Notwithstanding this controversy, such trials remained part of several legal systems until the 18th century. Animal defendants appeared before both church and secular courts, and the offences alleged against them ranged from murder to criminal damage. Human witnesses were often heard, and in ecclesiastical courts the animals were routinely provided with lawyers (this was not the case in secular courts, but for most of the period concerned, neither were human defendants). If convicted, it was usual for an animal to be executed or exiled. However, in 1750, a female donkey was acquitted of charges of bestiality due to witnesses to the animal's virtue and good behaviour while her co-accused human was sentenced to death. Translations of several of the most detailed records can be found in E. P. Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, published in 1906. The text alludes to research such as that carried out by Karl von Amira, who dealt with the matter from a jurisprudential approach to the work "Consilia" made by the lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée, defender of animals, more than once called to represent animals in the trials held. Thanks to Evans's research and analysis of the sources indicated, with special reference to Amira, a division can be made between Thierstrafen ("animal punishment"), and Thierprocesse ("animal trial"). Sadakat Kadri's The Trial: Four Thousand Years of Courtroom Drama (Random House, 2006) contains another detailed examination of the subject. Kadri shows that such trials of animals were part of a broader state of affairs, with prosecutions of corpses and inanimate objects, and argues that an echo of such rituals survives in modern attitudes towards the punishment of children and the mentally ill. Punishments of animals There were trials of animals accused of killing humans; the criminal procedure had some similarities with trials of humans: they had to be arrested and go through a trial hearing held by a secular court. If found guilty of homicide, the animal might suffer the death penalty. The animals that were most often punished by Thierstrafen were pigs. The work of Evans and Cohen has been used in jurisprudence about animal abuse that is currently debated in the Constitutional Court of Colombia, an institution that has cited this compilation of animal trials to debate animals' capacity and possibility to