Animal trial
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.
[2][3] In the thirteenth to the twentieth century, "animal trials were held in many European regions, especially in France, but also in Switzerland, Tyrol, Germany, the Netherlands, the southern Slavonic countries and, on rare occasions, in Italy and Spain.
These trials were part of a broader set of judicial practices that seem archaic to modern eyes, such as the prosecution of corpses and of inanimate objects.
Animal defendants appeared before both church and secular courts, and the charges brought against them ranged from murder to criminal damage.
However, in 1750, a female donkey was acquitted of charges of bestiality due to witness testimony affirming the animal's virtue and good behaviour.
[2][9] Although less frequent than those just described, other animal trials sought to condemn pests for destroying crops or causing other harm to humans.
These cases, generally handled by ecclesiastical courts, examined the misdeeds of a wide range of pests, including caterpillars, flies, moles, worms, snails, and leeches.
They requested the intervention of the church to begin with the pertinent metaphysical actions, such as exorcisms and incantations having holy water as their main element.
Signed by the parish priest and other principal residents of the commune it proclaimed that "they were willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.
"[3] A notable French jurist, Bartholomé Chassenée (1480-1542), successfully defended the rats of Autun through various largely procedural arguments.
[4] According to Johannis Gross in Kurze Basler Chronik (1624), a rooster was put on trial in 1474 in the city of Basel for "the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg", which the townspeople feared was spawned by Satan and contained a cockatrice, a malignant, winged reptile.
The facts underpinning these cases can occur when chickens develop male plumage as a result of tumours or other diseases of the ovaries.
Finally, given that the secular law of the time gained its legitimacy from and was closely linked to religious belief, the elaborate spectacles of animal executions could also have served as communal mechanisms for restoring faith in the broader divine and public order; that is, the spectacle provided a means for the public to see that both divine and secular "justice is done.
"[14] While animal trials and executions presumably made sense to many Medieval and early modern communities, the idea nevertheless attracted criticism of scholars and legal practitioners over many centuries.
In a similar vein, Thomas Aquinas asserts in Summa Theologiae that animals are not subjects of law because they cannot understand words or think rationally.
Philippe de Rémi, a French jurist and royal official who died in 1296, states in 1283 that criminal acts require intent and that, therefore, animals cannot commit them and should not be punished for them because they lack knowledge of good and evil.
