Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Crimes and Punishments

the whole (voting) population – the same groups that passed laws and elected magistrates. Charges were brought by vari ous magistrates, and sentences typically included fines and/or exile. On a few occasions in the second century bc, this elabo rate procedure was replaced by an investigatory commission led by a major magistrate and authorized in some cases by vote of the people and in some cases by the Senate. This was done only on an individualized, ad hoc basis, and the legality of the whole procedure was not clear. Beginning in the middle of the second century bc, trials before the assemblies began to be replaced more systematically by a procedure (the so-called quaestio perpetua or “standing inquiry”) that looked much more like the kind of trial we are used to, though it was still close in some respects to a private process. A separate court was established to try each offense, so there were slight procedural differences among them, though the details are not important here. There was no district attor ney, crown prosecutor, or other state agent. Prosecutions had to be launched by private citizens, though the prosecutor need not have been a victim of, or even connected to, the crime. The would-be prosecutor went to the praetor to ask permis sion to proceed, though we do not know how often this was denied. If more than one person wished to prosecute, then a preliminary hearing was held in which the jury had to decide which party would do a better job of arguing the main case. The jurors were selected from a panel of rich and merely well to-do citizens (the precise rules of eligibility were the subject of much political dispute) by a process of alternating rejections

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