Man appears in court charged under ancient law of hamesucken

Man appears in court charged under ancient law of hamesucken

A man has appeared in court charged under an ancient law for which the penalty is death.

Graeme Bryden, 27, was accused of “hamesucken” after he allegedly attacked and robbed a 93-year-old woman in her home.

The elderly woman was awoken at 2am on June 25 at her home in Saltcoats, North Ayrshire in what police said was a “very distressing experience”.

Mr Bryden did not make a plea or declaration at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court to charges of robbery and hamesucken.

He is to appear again next week for further examination.

Speaking to Scottish Legal News, John W. Cairns, professor of civil law at the University of Edinburgh explained the offence.

He said: “Hamesucken is a word of Germanic origin. The term came into Scottish legal usage through Anglo-Saxon: “Hamsocn”. In Danish it is: “hjemsøge”: in modern German: “heimsuchen”.

“The offence is that of pursuing someone into their home to assault them. It was once a capital offence (the medieval law-book Regiam majestatem said it was to be punished as was the ravishing of women, that is as a capital offence); by the eighteenth century, the Crown usually, but not always, only sought a non-capital punishment, though individuals were still sometimes hanged for it. There were similar offences with similar names in other northern European countries.”

Professor Cairns added: “It was punished severely, because of its implications for preservation of the peace in a country of the blood-feud.

“When, in 1887, Scots criminal procedure no longer required the libelling of a “nomen juris” in an indictment, the term might have been expected to fall out of use, particularly when the death penalty in 1887 became restricted to murder. It is effectively in modern terms an aggravated assault, aggravated as to place.

“Of course, it still resonates as a term, because individuals like to feel secure in their own home, and invasion of one’s home seems particularly heinous. It is still sometimes mentioned to add a special feeling of moral wrongness to an offence, with the courts still using the term from time to time: HMA v Brown (1989); McAdam v Ingram (1990), to give just two examples.”

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