Adjudication of public crimes by the people may have been efficacious in the context of a small city-state composed of conservative farmers and middle-class citizens.
However, as socio-economic and political conditions became more complex, especially in the period following Rome’s wars of expansion, comitial trials proved increasingly inadequate to deal with the complicated issues that criminal prosecutions frequently invoked.
Quite aside from the fact that trials by the people were cumbersome and time-consuming, the escalating number of cases made adjudication of public crimes by the assemblies very difficult.[460] Inevitably, popular criminal justice eventually had to be replaced by a new and more functional court system. The gradual evolution commenced in the early second century BC with the creation, by decision of the people, of special ad hoc tribunals (quaestiones extraordinariae) for the investigation of certain offences of a political nature. These embraced offences such as abuse of power or dereliction of duty by magistrates and provincial officials, and conspiracies against public order and the security of the state. Moreover, the senate, on occasions of emergency, assumed (or usurped) the power of setting up, by its own authority alone and without the sanction of the people, special courts from which there was no appeal.[461] A tribunal of this kind consisted invariably of a magistrate cum imperio (i.e. a consul or a praetor) surrounded by a body of assessors (consilium) selected by the magistrate or the senate. The court’s decision was determined by the majority of the assessors and no appeal against it was allowed as the court was regarded to represent the people. An early illustration of a special quaestio was the commission established by the senate in 186 bc to investigate and punish the crimes committed by members of the Bacchanalian cult.[462]In the transformed socio-political conditions of the later Republic, the quaestiones extraordinariae provided a more efficient means of dealing with public crimes than the iudicia populi, whose role in the administration of justice gradually diminished. However, it was only with the introduction of standing courts of justice that a stricter regulation of criminal procedure was finally realized.
4.3.1
Source:
Mousourakis G.. Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition. Springer,2015. — 339 p.. 2015
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