The extraordinary courts: quaestiones extraordinariae
Although serious offences fell within the jurisdiction of the comitia, from an early period it became common for the comitia to set up special tribunals {quaestiones extraordinariae') for the investigation of certain crimes, especially crimes of a political nature.
One of the main reasons behind this development was that it was often very difficult for a popular assembly to inquire into the complexities of a criminal prosecution and to handle complicated and often inconsistent evidence. Moreover, the business of calling together an assembly was cumbersome and time wasting. In the later Republic special tribunals set up by decree of the senate or by a plebiscite dealt with crimes relating to abuse of power or dereliction of duty by magistrates and provincial governors and other acts regarded as detrimental to interests of the state.[498] [499] Such a special quaestio SNSS,, for example, the commission set up by the senate in 186 BC to investigate and punish the crimes committed by members of the Bacchanalian societies.[500] In these courts the presiding magistrate, usually a consul or a praetor, was assisted by a consilium, or body of assessors, whose role was similar to that of a modem day jury.[501] [502] The decision of the court was determined by the majority of the assessors and, as the court was regarded as representing the people, no appeal against its decisions was permitted. In the changed social and political conditions of the later Republic, the quaestiones extraordinariae provided a more efficient way of dealing with criminal cases than the usual procedure before the comitia, and the role of the latter in the administration of justice gradually declined. The introduction of these courts was an important step towards the establishment of the permanent court system {quaestiones perpetuae), which began to emerge from the middle of the second century BC.1 3This page intentionally left blank
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More on the topic The extraordinary courts: quaestiones extraordinariae:
- Extraordinary Wills
- The inhabitants of Rome lived with the reality of legal courts scattered throughout the public and private spaces of the city, and perhaps even came to resent, on occasion, the impact such courts made on traffic flow during the busy hours of the day.
- Other extraordinary magistrates
- The Permanent Jury Courts
- County Courts
- The courts
- Binding precedent in relation to specific courts
- Courts of other magistrates
- Magistrates’ courts
- The distinction between types of courts
- Criminal procedure in the standing courts
- Advocacy in present-day courts
- The Code, the Courts, and the Law Prior to Codification
- Courts of the praetors