Definition
A committitur is a written order or minute directing that a named person be committed to the custody of the sheriff. It functions as the formal instrument memorializing the act of commitment — the paperwork that operationalizes the court's or creditor's authority to place someone in custodial detention. The term derives from the Latin for "he is committed."
Two related instruments carry the name:
1. Committitur (general): The court order or minute recording that a specific person has been committed to the sheriff's custody. It may arise in criminal proceedings, civil contempt, or surrender of a defendant by a surety.
2. Committitur piece: A specific instrument in writing on paper or parchment that charges a person already in prison with execution at the suit of the person who originally arrested him — used to convert a pre-existing detention into a formal execution hold.
Common Confusion
The committitur should not be confused with the broader term "commitment," which refers to the act or state of being confined, or with a "mittimus," which is a warrant directing a jailer or prison officer to receive and hold a prisoner. The committitur is the record or minute that a commitment has occurred or is ordered; the mittimus is the directive to the receiving institution. In historical practice the terms overlapped, and researchers will find them used interchangeably in older sources — a terminological inconsistency that can obscure what instrument was actually issued in a given proceeding.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in procedural and practice contexts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers working in historical civil procedure — particularly debt collection, bail, and surety law — will encounter committitur in records and treatises from that era. Its relevance today is largely antiquarian: modern criminal and civil detention rests on commitment orders and bench warrants issued under statutory frameworks that have displaced the older Latin terminology.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the committitur piece is a specialized sub-instrument with a distinct function from the general committitur. Sources that use the bare term "committitur" may mean either, and the procedural context must be read carefully to determine which is meant.
Second, the surrender context is important. Burrill notes that the committitur was most commonly used on the surrender of a defendant by a surety — that is, when a bail bondsman returned the defendant to custody. This is a specific procedural moment with its own rules, and a committitur appearing in that context signals something different from a committitur arising out of a contempt finding or criminal remand.
Third, Anderson's entry cross-references "COMMIT" and an entry beginning "IN-" (likely "INSOLVENT" or a related term), suggesting that in some corpus sources the committitur is treated as a component of debtor and insolvency proceedings rather than criminal law. Researchers should not assume a criminal context when the instrument appears in civil practice records.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four historical sources largely agree on the core definition: a committitur is an order or minute committing a named person to the sheriff's custody. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill are consistent. The 2nd edition of Black's adds the committitur piece as a defined sub-term, which is the most substantively useful addition across the sources.
Burrill provides the most illuminating gloss by noting the surrender-of-defendant context as the most common occasion for the instrument's use — a detail absent from Black's that is essential for understanding how the term functioned in practice rather than in the abstract.
Anderson's entry is unhelpfully brief, directing the reader to cross-references without providing independent analysis. Researchers relying on Anderson's alone would need to trace those references.
None of the historical sources situate the committitur within a broader procedural narrative or explain how it related to other commitment instruments. That gap is consistent across the shelf and suggests the term was treated as self-evident by practitioners of the period.
Jurisdictional Note
The committitur is a common-law procedural instrument with English origins. Its use in American practice tracks the reception of English common law procedure and is most relevant to jurisdictions and time periods where that procedural tradition was strong. Modern American courts do not use this terminology as a live instrument.