Definition
To acquit is to formally discharge a person from a criminal charge, either through a verdict of not guilty rendered by a jury or judge, or through a court's legal certification of innocence. A person who is acquitted cannot be retried for the same offense under double jeopardy protections.
In a secondary, non-criminal sense, to acquit also means to discharge or release a party from an obligation, debt, or liability — typically accomplished in writing. In this sense the word functions more like "acquittance" and appears in older commercial and property instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To declare or find innocent or not guilty; also, to discharge a claim or debt, or to conduct oneself (as in "she acquitted herself well").
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Acquitted; set free; rid of. [Archaic]
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but worth flagging. In ordinary speech, to acquit often carries a connotation of moral exoneration — the person was truly innocent. In law, acquittal is procedural: it means the prosecution failed to meet its burden beyond a reasonable doubt. A jury can acquit a defendant it privately believes to be guilty. Researchers reading acquit as moral vindication in legal sources will misread what the record actually says.
Common Confusion
ACQUIT vs. ACQUITTANCE: These are related but distinct. To acquit in the criminal sense produces an acquittal. To acquit in the debt/obligation sense produces an acquittance — a written receipt or discharge. Older legal instruments, particularly in property and commercial law, use acquit in the obligation sense far more often than in the criminal sense. Researchers encountering acquit in deeds, bonds, or indentures should understand it as a release of financial or contractual obligation, not a criminal verdict.
ACQUIT vs. EXONERATE: Exoneration may imply a finding of actual innocence or removal of all legal consequences (including collateral ones). Acquittal is the narrower procedural verdict at trial. Modern post-conviction relief statutes sometimes distinguish the two expressly.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of acquit — criminal discharge and civil/obligation release — creates real indexing hazards in historical corpora. Documents from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries use acquit, acquitted, and acquittance interchangeably in property conveyances, bond instruments, and debt settlements. A full-text search for acquit across the Law Mind corpus will return both criminal and non-criminal results, and the surrounding document type (indictment vs. deed vs. bond) is the only reliable disambiguation signal.
The criminal meaning is stable across time, but the plea of autrefois acquit (formerly acquitted) is a related term with its own procedural history that researchers in early common law materials must track separately. Anderson's entry treats autrefois acquit as the more practically significant form for courtroom use, and the plea appears frequently in English and early American criminal records as a formal double jeopardy bar.
Jurisdictional note: In bench trials and directed verdict contexts, the procedural mechanism for acquittal varies — some jurisdictions use a formal judgment of acquittal (the modern federal Rule 29 motion), others use directed verdict terminology. Historical sources predating the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (1946) will use directed verdict language where modern sources say acquittal. Researchers tracing double jeopardy doctrine across pre- and post-1946 sources should watch for this terminological shift.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge cleanly on two meanings. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's all define acquit as: (1) to release or discharge from criminal accusation, and (2) to discharge from obligation. Burrill is the most precise, explicitly separating the criminal sense (see Acquittal) from the obligation sense (see Acquittance) and noting that the latter is properly done in writing. This structural separation in Burrill is editorially useful — it signals that the two senses, though sharing a root, had developed into functionally distinct legal operations by the mid-nineteenth century.
Anderson's entry is notable for foregrounding autrefois acquit rather than the base term, reflecting the practical orientation of that dictionary toward pleading and procedure. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry retrieved under this heading appears to address acknowledgment rather than acquittal, suggesting either a cross-reference artifact or a scanning/indexing issue in the source — researchers should verify that volume directly.
None of the historical dictionaries address the directed verdict mechanism or the constitutional double jeopardy dimension in any depth, which is expected given their era. For the constitutional doctrine attaching to acquittal, researchers must move beyond these dictionary sources to treatise and case law materials.
Jurisdictional Note
Double jeopardy protection attaching to acquittal is a constitutional floor in the United States (Fifth Amendment), but the precise procedural triggers — what court action counts as a formal acquittal for double jeopardy purposes — vary and have generated substantial federal case law. In English law, the equivalent protection runs through the autrefois acquit plea and the rule against double jeopardy as modified by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which introduced limited exceptions for serious offenses. Researchers comparing American and English sources should not assume the doctrines are coextensive.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Acquittal; Double Jeopardy; Autrefois Acquit