On the 1st of August, 1818, he was declared guilty of murder and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in a fortress. The regular punishment for murder was death, but in this case the learned jurist Feuerbach admitted that had the court not accepted Riembauer’s confession, he could not have been convicted, because the evidence, though strong, was purely circumstantial. It was proved that the woman had visited him; that an umbrella marked with her initials was in his possession; that she had been buried under a shed on his farm, and that the floor of his room was stained with blood and showed the result of efforts to remove the stains with a plane; yet the court held that evidence was lacking as to marks on the body for sufficient proof of the actual manner of death. The use of physical torture was abandoned in 1806, and then only with a strong protest from judges of the old school, who parted with great reluctance with so simple and expeditious a method of obtaining evidence. Curiously enough, the accused persons in the Bavarian courts were generally moved to confess. Many reasons for this are given. Some few confessed from remorse, others could not beat off the pertinacious interrogatories of the judge, not a few were anxious to end the long period of acute anxiety and suspense, and many were exasperated beyond measure by the strict discipline and compulsory silence enforced in Bavarian prisons. Rather than be condemned to perpetual silence, the accused would speak out even to his own undoing. Capital punishment was legal in Bavaria and was inflicted by decapitation with a sword, or breaking on the wheel from the feet upwards. But where conviction rested on circumstantial evidence only, or assumed guilt was not borne out by actual confession, imprisonment for life in chains was substituted, and it was a terrible penalty. The sentence annihilated civil existence; it was moral if not physical death. The culprit lost all rights as a husband, father or citizen; he was deprived of property, freedom and honour; nothing remained but bare life passed in slavery and chains. There was no recovery even if error were proved. He did not get back what he had lost, and if his wife married again he could not recover his property. It was not capital punishment, but it was death in life. In the progressive national development of Prussia, as wars were waged and fresh territory acquired, prison reform obtained attention. In Hesse-Cassel, prisons were in a very backward state and many were condemned as unfit for habitation. In Hanover alone conditions were more satisfactory. The journalist Hans Leuss served a term of three years’ imprisonment in 1894 in one of the chief prisons, that of Celle-on-the-Aller, which he graphically describes in his autobiography.