Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning acquitted, discharged, or released from a criminal charge. Acquietatus describes the condition of a person who has been formally pronounced innocent by a jury — that is, cleared of a criminal accusation through a verdict of the jury (per pais), as opposed to discharge by some other legal mechanism such as a royal pardon or dismissal by a judge.
The term functions primarily as a past participial adjective in pleading and procedural records, marking the status of a defendant following a jury's determination of innocence.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English legal records, writs, and plea rolls. Researchers working with medieval and early modern English court documents — particularly records predating the standardization of English legal procedure — will encounter acquietatus in formal pleadings and writs as the operative word confirming jury acquittal.
The critical research distinction is that acquietatus carried a technically specific meaning from a very early period: it denoted discharge by jury only, not discharge by other means. A researcher reading a historical writ or plea record must distinguish acquietatus from other terms of discharge or release (such as quietus, which signaled discharge from financial obligations or administrative duties, and which is etymologically related but functionally different). Conflating these risks misreading the nature of the disposition recorded.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should note that this term will surface most frequently in records and treatises referencing the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Writs) tradition and in early common law reporters. Its appearances in later secondary sources are largely explanatory and definitional rather than operative.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary historical account. Burrill traces acquietatus to the Latin acquietare and correctly identifies its operative legal sense as acquittal by jury, specifically noting that this meaning — jury discharge, per pais — was established from a very early period in English law, citing the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig.) at folio 134b with a nota indicating the historical precision of this usage.
Burrill also cites Coke (9 Co. 56) and Crooke's Caroline reports (Cro. Car. 420), placing the term's documented usage across a wide span of early common law authority. Researchers should note that no single secondary authority substantially contradicts or elaborates beyond Burrill on this term; it is a narrow, archaic term of art with a settled and consistent historical meaning. What historical sources collectively miss is any treatment of how acquietatus interacted with or was distinguished from parallel mechanisms of discharge in equity or ecclesiastical proceedings — a gap that reflects the term's tight confinement to common law criminal pleading.
Jurisdictional Note
Acquietatus is a term of English common law and does not appear in American legal practice as an operative term. It is of research relevance to historians and scholars working with English legal materials through roughly the seventeenth century. American courts adopted the anglicized acquitted in all formal usage.