Definition
A Latin term meaning "separately." In criminal pleading, *separaliter* appeared in indictments to signal that two or more defendants were each charged individually with the offense alleged — not jointly as co-defendants in a single shared charge. The word functioned as a formal pleading marker, placing each named defendant's criminal liability on its own footing within the same instrument.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *separaliter* in historical indictments, plea records, or criminal procedure materials should treat it as a technical pleading word rather than a substantive legal concept. Its presence signals a deliberate drafting choice: the charging authority was preserving the option to try defendants independently, or was acknowledging that the offense could not be laid jointly against all named parties. This distinction had real procedural consequences in an era when misjoinder of defendants could be fatal to a prosecution.
The term belongs almost entirely to historical criminal pleading practice. It falls out of standard usage as American criminal procedure modernizes and formal Latin pleading requirements give way to notice pleading standards in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Researchers working in colonial, early republic, or antebellum criminal records are most likely to encounter it. It will not appear in modern charging instruments.
A related research trap: because *separaliter* appears alongside defendant names in an indictment, a reader unfamiliar with the term might misread it as part of a proper name or a case caption element. Recognizing it as a pleading term of art — not a party designation — is essential to correctly parsing the document's structure.
Within the Law Mind corpus, *separaliter* connects naturally to materials on criminal pleading, indictment form, and the rules governing joinder and severance of defendants. Researchers following a thread on *separaliter* should move next to the substantive doctrine of severance and to historical discussions of joint versus several liability in criminal prosecutions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree closely on this term. The first edition offers a compact functional definition; the second edition adds the Latin label explicitly and supplies *State v. Edwards*, 60 Mo. 490, as a documentary anchor — one of the few dictionary entries of this type to cite authority directly, suggesting the editors regarded the term as potentially obscure enough to warrant grounding.
Neither edition elaborates on the procedural consequences of the word's inclusion or omission in an indictment, nor do they address how courts treated indictments where the word was present for some defendants but not others. That silence is itself informative: by the time both editions were compiled, *separaliter* was already receding from active practice, and Black's was recording it as a term of historical and documentary significance rather than one requiring extensive doctrinal treatment.
No common law treatise definitions are available in the source set to cross-check against.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears in the Missouri case record cited by Black's, suggesting some documented American use, but *separaliter* is rooted in English common law pleading practice and is not unique to any American jurisdiction. Researchers should not assume its usage was uniform across states or that its procedural effect was interpreted identically wherever it appeared.