Between the Late Republic and the Principate, in the system of the standing jury-courts, the quaestiones perpetuae, there was no modern public prosecution system. It was up to the private citizens, acting as representatives of the community, to present an accusation against the alleged culprit and to present the case. The downside of this main feature of this system of administration of criminal justice was that it was open to the widespread misuse of the accusation. Criminal proceedings were started not only to prosecute a criminal offence, but to hamper political and personal enemies, to promote one’s political career by accusing someone famous or simply tempted by the prizes set by the criminal statutes.
The misuse of the accusation and, consequently, of criminal proceedings was a common practice during the early Principate.
My research investigates the subject of the crimes against the administration of justice in the criminal proceedings of the Imperial era, focusing on the crimen tergiversationis, from its introduction in the Roman legal system with the senatus consultum Turpillianum in 61 AD until the end of the Severian age.
Until the reign of Claudius, the situation did not change for the standard jury-courts proceedings. The BGU 611 papyrus contains the transcript of an oratio principis in senatu habita, where Claudius aimed to impose a punishment against those accusatores who – after having started a iudicium publicum against someone – decided to subsequently drop the accusation.
These provisions laid the groundwork for the subsequent Turpillian decree. Through the comparison between the literary sources and the contents of the BGU 611 papyrus, it’s possible to identify in the legal sources included in the Digest and in the Codex what were the provisions originally included in the senatorial decree and which one of those were the results of the work of the Roman lawyers or the imperial chancellery.
This research allows not only to examine a usually neglected subject in the Roman criminal law studies, but also to deal with broader questions concerning the administration of criminal justice during the Principate, such as the relationship between iudicia publica and the new cognitiones and the persistence of the adversarial system in the latter.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unitn.it/oai:iris.unitn.it:11572/391609 |
| Date | 13 October 2023 |
| Creators | Cristinelli, Matteo |
| Contributors | Cristinelli, Matteo, Miglietta, Massimo |
| Publisher | Università degli studi di Trento, place:TRENTO |
| Source Sets | Università di Trento |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | firstpage:1, lastpage:364, numberofpages:364 |
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