CHAPTER IV
MODE OF TRIAL IN ROMAN CAPITAL CASES
THE reader should keep clearly and constantly in mind the purpose of this chapter: to describe the mode of trial in capital cases at Rome during the reign of Tiberius Cæsar; and thus to furnish a model of criminal procedure which Pilate should have imitated in the trial of Jesus at Jerusalem. In the last chapter, we saw that the proceedings of the permanent tribunals (quæstiones perpetuæ) at Rome furnished models for the trial of criminal cases in the provinces. It is now only necessary to determine what the procedure of the permanent tribunals at the time of Christ was, in order to understand what Pilate should have done in the trial of Jesus. But the character of the quæstiones perpetuæ, as well as the rules and regulations that governed their proceedings, cannot well be understood without reference to the criminal tribunals and modes of trial in criminal cases that preceded them. Roman history discloses two distinct periods of criminal procedure before the organization of the permanent tribunals about the beginning of the last century of the Republic: (1) The period of the kings and (2) the period of the early republic. Each of these will be here briefly considered.
The Regal Period.—The earliest glimpses of Roman political life reveal the existence of a sacred and military monarchy in which the king is generalissimo of the army, chief pontiff of the national religion, and supreme judge in civil and criminal matters over the lives and property of the citizens. These various powers and attributes are wrapped up in the imperium. By virtue of the imperium, the king issued commands to the army and also exercised the highest judicial functions over the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens. The kings were thus military commanders and judges in one person, as the consuls were after them. The monarch might sit alone and judge cases and impose sentences; but the trial was usually a personal investigation undertaken by him with the advice and aid of a chosen body of judges from the senate or the pontifical college. According to Dionysius, Romulus ordered that all crimes of a serious nature should be tried by the king, but that all lighter offenses should be judged by the senate.[17] Little confidence can be reposed in this statement, since the age and deeds of Romulus are exceedingly legendary and mythical. But it is historically true that in the regal period of Rome the kings were the supreme judges in all civil and criminal matters.
The Early Republican Period.—The abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic witnessed the distribution of the powers of government formerly exercised by the king among a number of magistrates and public officers. Consuls, tribunes, prætors, ædiles, both curule and plebeian, exercised, under the republic, judicial functions in criminal matters.
The consuls were supreme criminal judges at the beginning of the republic, and were clothed with unlimited power in matters of life and death. This is shown by the condemnation and execution of the sons of Brutus and their fellow-conspirators.[18] Associated with the consuls were, at first, two annually appointed quæstors whom they nominated. The functions of the quæstors were as unlimited as those of their superiors, the consuls; but their jurisdiction was confined chiefly to criminal matters and finance.
The tribunes, sacred and inviolable in their persons as representatives of the plebs and as their protectors against patrician oppression, exercised at first merely a negative control over the regular magistracies of the community. But, finally, they became the chief public prosecutors of political criminals.
The prætors, whose chief jurisdiction was in civil matters, were potentially as fully criminal judges as the consuls, and there may have been a time when a portion of criminal jurisdiction was actually in their hands. In the later republic, they presided over the quæstiones perpetuæ, permanent criminal tribunals.