FROM ORDEALS TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW: OVERCOMING EVIDENCE THROUGH SUFFERING IN THE HISTORY OF THE TRIAL

Abstract

It was the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, in particular, that began the process of abolishing ordeals, evidentiary practices that combined faith and physical suffering as a means of revealing the truth. After this ecclesiastical assembly, the medieval ordeals, "judicium Dei," gradually gave way, despite the Catholic Church's Inquisition Courts having made torture official, to rational evidentiary methods based on documents and testimonies. Using historical-legal methodology and a critical bibliographic review of indexed classical and contemporary authors, the research reveals humanity's strategies for achieving the ideal of Justice through the institution of formal inquisitorial and/or accusatory procedures directed by a previously constituted authority, until rationalism decisively influences its nature, to the point of materializing procedural values ​​fundamental to the dignity of the human person, such as due process, adversarial proceedings, full defense, the presumption of innocence and others, essential to the Democratic State of Law, a political formula considered ideal for guaranteeing human rights