Bevisvärdering i brottmål i ljuset av Balkongfallet

Sammanfattning: In Sweden, individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty. To be convicted of a crime, it is also required that it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator acted against a penal provision. The court is entrusted with the task of determining whether the contrary has been proven or not. Based on the investigation and evidence presented for and against the specific charges, the court must evaluate whether the charge is "established beyond reasonable doubt". The court is given some instructions through law on how this can be appropriately carried out. The instruction is primarily found in Chapter 35, Section 1 of the Code of Judicial Procedure. This legal provision states that the court must make a diligent examination of everything that has come up in the case and then decide what has been proven. The provision does not establish much more than that there is a free evaluation of evidence of the evidence that the parties have invoked in the case. However, the legislator stipulates through Chapter 35, Section 2 of the Code of Judicial Procedure that circumstances that are generally known and current Swedish law do not require any evidence. Therefore, the court has the right to use notorious facts and experiential propositions in its evaluation of evidence. Moreover, it follows from Chapter 17, Section 2 and Chapter 30, Section 2, which stipulate the so-called immediacy principle, that the decision may only be based on such material that has occurred at the main hearing. The above paragraph presents, in principle, the exhaustive frameworks that the Swedish national law has established for the court's evaluation of evidence. What methods and theories of proof that the court should use for the evaluation of evidence to be conscientious has been left for the courts to determine. The courts in Sweden have received some guidance from the Supreme Court. This essay investigates what this guidance entails and how the courts, as well as other court jurists in criminal cases, can apply these in practice. The essay also investigates whether there exists a useful tool that judges and other court jurists can employ in their evaluation of evidence in accord-ance with the guidance of the Supreme Court.