To “get rid in freedom of the crime”: the cartas de seguro in the Portuguese America (mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century)

Abstract:

The subject of the article is the “cartas de seguro” (insurance letters), writs granted on behalf of the king so that one or more people could get out of prison before the final decision on the crime allegedly committed. Here we take all those granted by the Court of Appeal of Rio de Janeiro, between the years 1753 and 1808, in number of 1,603 writs. First, we present how insurance letters were conceived from legal doctrine and then how they proceeded by the Court of Appeal. Our hypothesis is that insurance letters were widespread in the legal culture of the time, also by various social sectors, as well as that they were often associated with more expeditious juridical forms of litigious solving; which allows us to question a certain silence about their history in Brazil.

Keywords:
Petitions; Rights; Arrests