CHAPTER 22. -- Decree. For Which Offenses the Death Penalty Should Be Inflicted on Someone, and for Which Offenses the Penally Should Not Be Death, But [Another] Punishment Should Be Imposed. In It Are 26 Articles.

1. If any son or daughter kills his father or mother: for patricide or matricide, punish them also with death, without the slightest mercy.

2. If any son or daughter kills his or her father or mother with some other people, and that is established conclusively: after investigation, also punish with death, without the slightest mercy, those who committed such a deed with them.

3.If a father or mother kills a son or daughter: imprison them for a year that. After having sat in prison for a year, they shall go to God's church, and in God's church they shall declare aloud that sin of theirs to all the people. Do not punish a father or mother with death for [killing] a son or daughter.

4. If someone, a son or a daughter, forgetting Christian law, proceeds to utter coarse speeches to a father or mother, or out of impudence strikes a father or mother, and the father or mother proceeds to petition against them for that: beat such forgetters of Christian law with the knout for the father and mother.

5. If any son or daughter plunder[s] a father's or mother's movable property by force; or not honoring the father and mother and [attempting] to drive them out, proceed[s] to denounce them for some evil deeds; or a son or daughter does not proceed to respect and feed a father and mother in their old age, does not proceed to support them materially in any way, and the father or mother proceed[s] to petition the sovereign against him or her about that: inflict a severe punishment on such children for such deeds of theirs, beat them mercilessly with the knout, and command them to attend to their father and mother in all obedience without any back-talk. Do not believe their denunciation.

6. If any son or daughter proceed[s] to petition for a trial against a father or mother: do not grant them a trial in any matter against a father or mother. Beat them with the knout for such a petition and return them to the father and mother.

7. If someone himself kills a brother or a sister, or someone else kills them at his command, and that is established conclusively: punish them all themselves with death as well for that.

8. If someone's slave contemplates killing that person whom he serves; or, desiring to kill him, draws a weapon against him: cut off his hand for such an action.

9. If someone's slave kills that person whom he serves: punish him himself with death as well, without the slightest mercy.

10. If someone, not fearing God and not fearing the sovereign's disgrace and punishment, inflicts an atrocious torment on someone, cuts off a hand, or a foot, or a nose, or an ear, or cuts off [his] lips, or pokes out an eye, and that is established conclusively: inflict the same on him for such an atrocity. Moreover, that person on whom he committed such an atrocity shall collect [compensation] from his hereditary estates and his movable property: if he cut off a hand, 50 rubles for the hand; if he cut off a foot, also 50 rubles for the foot; and for a nose, and for an ear, and for lips, and for an eye, and accordingly for any injury, 50 rubles.

11. If such a perpetrator of atrocities, having invited, or having dragged by force, someone to his house, proceeds to beat him with a club, the knout, or a bastinado, and that is established conclusively at trial: inflict a severe punishment on such a perpetrator of atrocities for such a deed of his, order him beaten with the knout around the market places. Cast him in prison for a month. That [person] on whom he inflicted such [a torment] shall exact from him his dishonor compensation and maiming two-fold.

12. If someone's slave inflicts such an atrocity on someone: torture that slave [to learn] at whose instruction he committed such an atrocity.

If that slave testifies under torture that he committed such an atrocity at the instruction of that person whom he serves, or at someone else's instruction: inflict a severe punishment for that on those people who instruct someone in such a deed, and that person who committed such a deed accordingly, beat them with a knout around the market places and cast them all in prison for a month.

Those people against whom the slaves commit such an atrocity shall exact their dishonor compensation two-fold from those people who instruct their slaves [to commit] such a deed.

If someone's slave commits such an atrocity against someone on his own volition and not at anyone's instruction: having tortured such slaves, punish them with death.

13. Concerning insurgents who instigate civil disorder among the people, and plot evil-doings against many people by their own felonious design: punish such insurgents with death for that felony of theirs.

14. If a wife kills her husband, or feeds him poison, and that is established conclusively: punish her for that, bury her alive in the ground and punish her with that punishment without any mercy, even if the children of the killed [husband], or any other close relatives of his, do not desire that she be executed. Do not show her the slightest mercy, and keep her in the ground until that time when she dies.

15.If a woman is sentenced to the death penalty and she is pregnant at that time: do not punish that woman with death until she gives birth, and execute her at the time when she has given birth. Until that time, keep her in prison, or in the custody of reliable bailiffs, so that she will not depart.

16. If someone with felonious intent comes into someone's house, and desires to do something shameful to the mistress of that house, or desires to carry her away somewhere out of that house; and her slaves do not defend her against that felon, and proceed to assist those people who have come for her in the commission [of the crime]: and subsequently such a deed of theirs is discovered: punish with death all those felons who with such intent come into another's house and those slaves who assist them in the commission of such a felony.

17. If someone out of bravado, or drunkenness, or deliberate intent gallops on a horse over someone's wife, and knocks her down and tramples her with the horse, and thereby dishonors her, or injures her with such a blow; and if a pregnant wife delivers a still-born child because of that blow of his, but she herself lives, and that is established conclusively at trial: inflict a severe punishment on that person who commits such a deed, order him beaten with the knout mercilessly. That wife shall exact from him the dishonor compensation and the maiming fee two-fold. Cast him in prison for three months.

If that wife herself dies from that blow of his: punish him with death for such an act of his.

18. If such a homicide occurs without deliberate intent on someone's part because the horse, frightened by something and having broken the bridle, bolted and he was unable to restrain it [the horse]: do not accuse that person of homicide and do not inflict a punishment on anyone for such a deed because such a case occurred without evil intent.

19. If someone kills someone else at someone's instruction, and that is established conclusively: punish both, the person who instructed the homicide and [the person] who did the killing, with death.

20. If someone shoot[s] from a handgun or from a bow at a wild animal, or at a bird, or at a target; and the arrow or bullet goes astray and kills someone over a hill or beyond a fence; or if someone by any chance kills someone with a piece of wood, or a rock, or anything else in a non-deliberate act; and previously there was no enmity or other animosity between that person who killed and that [person] he killed; and it is established about that conclusively that such a homicide occurred without deliberation and without intent: do not punish anyone with death for such a homicide and do not incarcerate anyone in prison because that event occurred accidentally, without intent.

21. If someone's slave kills someone or wounds someone while defending that person whom he serves: do not accuse that person's slave of a crime, but interrogate that person whom he serves about that homicide.

22. If he [a slave] kills someone by his own intent, without the knowledge of that person whom he serves; and that person whom he serves, clearing himself and having apprehended the slave, brings him for arraignment to the [Felony or the Moscow Administrative] Chancellery, and himself informs [the officials] about that homicide: do not accuse that person to whom that slave belongs in that homicide case. Punish his slave who committed such a homicide with death.

23. If someone poisons someone with poison, and that person who was poisoned dies from that poison: torture rigorously that person who commits such an evil deed [to learn] whether he previously had committed such a deed against anyone else. Having tortured him, punish him with death.

24. If a Muslim by any means whatsoever, by force or by deceit, compels a Russian [to convert] to his Islamic faith; and he circumcises that Russian according to his Islamic faith; and that is established conclusively: punish that Muslim after investigation, burn him with fire without any mercy.

Concerning the Russian whom he converted to Islam: send that Russian to the patriarch, or to another high ecclesiastical figure, and order him to compile a decree according to the canons of the Holy Apostles and the Holy Fathers.

25. If someone of the male gender, or the female gender, having forgotten the wrath of God and Christian law, proceeds to procure adult women and mature girls for fornication, and that is established conclusively: inflict a severe punishment on them for such a lawless and vile business, beat them with the knout.

26. If a woman proceeds to live in fornication and vileness, and in fornication begets children with someone; and she herself, or someone else at her command, destroys those children; and that is established conclusively: punish with death without any mercy such lawless women and that person who destroyed her children at her order so that others looking on will not commit such a lawless and vile deed and will refrain from fornication.