Concluding note

Although the introduction of the standing court system made for the more efficient administration of the criminal law, the system was not free from problems. Proceedings were expensive and cumbersome and, as cases often had to be heard more than once, trials could drag on for a long time.

It is true that (unlike the earlier iudicia populi) a jury of less than a hundred members could follow complicated evidence and assess the parties' credibility better than a crowd of thousands. However, as the presiding magistrate did not provide any assistance by directing the jury or by summing up at the end, jurors were often as amenable to emotional pleas as

the people in the iudicia populi. A further problem was that, as laws often overlapped in the offences with which they dealt, a person could find himself charged with the same type of offence twice - especially if the prosecution was politically motivated. From the early years of the Augustan era a new type of legal procedure, known as cognitio extra ordinem, became more and more important while the jury courts, although still in existence in the second century AD, gradually faded into the background. Under the new system the private juror disappeared and the guilt or innocence of the accused, as well as the sentence, was determined by the emperor, or by a state official acting as a delegate of the emperor.²³²

232

See chapter 8 below.

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Source: Mousourakis George. The Historical and Institutional Context of Roman Law. Routledge,2003. — 480 p.. 2003

Concluding note

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