Abstract
Although Maria Theresa of Austria (r. 1740-80) extended her reform
program to include matters of criminal procedure, she did not follow
Prussian ruler Frederick II in abolishing judicial torture (1740, 1754).
Rather, the standards laid out in her criminal code,
Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana
(1769), continued to rely on earlier concepts of punitive justice – a
point made clear by the following engraving, which presents Habsburg
judicial procedures for “interrogation under torture” in meticulous
detail. In the Austrian Empire, torture was finally abolished in 1777,
due in part to the efforts of Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733-1817), jurist
and rector magnificus at the
University of Vienna.