Quaestio perpetua
Unlike the older trials before a popular assembly, which had to be convoked for that purpose by a sitting magistrate, the courts were always open and any citizen could bring charges.
[3] The first permanent jury court in Rome was formed in 149 BC with the passage of the lex Calpurnia de repetundis by the plebeian tribune Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi.
Some historians believe that the first permanent courts were established earlier (perhaps in 159 BC) or later (with Gaius Gracchus' laws) but this is not supported by Ciceronean evidence.
[5] Prior to this point, any actions had to be brought either before a popular assembly or before an ad hoc tribunal established by law for that purpose.
This was cumbersome and the permanent court established by the lex Calpurnia eventually displaced these ad hoc inquests over large portions of the law.
One of the main issues in that year was outrage over the corrupt actions of Roman governors in the provinces: for example, there was unsuccessful legislation brought to establish a special tribunal to try Servius Sulpicius Galba, who was governor in Hispania Ulterior the previous year,[7] for treacherously inducing a number of Lusitanian tribes to surrender before massacring them and selling the survivors into slavery.
[14] During one of the tribunates of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, in either 103 or 101–100 BC,[15] he passed legislation establishing a permanent court on maiestas cases.
[16] The permanent court on poisonings had been formed by 98 BC and likely is older, having emerged from a moral panic some time in the second century about wives disposing of their aristocratic husbands.
[18] Under Sulla's laws, it amalgamated with the court on poisonings, and in general dealt with citizens who were armed with the intention of committing crimes such a murder, theft, or arson.
Metaphorically, as false convictions resulted in a citizen's judicial or political (though not actual) death by exile, these also came into the court inter sicarios's jurisdiction.
[1] Matters of state, such as treason, were likewise transferred to a compliant senate, which began in the imperial period to take on judicial responsibilities.
[25] At the beginning, with Piso's lex Calpurnia and the quaestio de repetundis, only Roman citizens could prosecute, which disadvantaged non-Roman provincials.
[25] Under the Gracchan procedures in the court de repetundis, a praetor assembled at the start of the year an album of 450 jurors from the equestrian order who were not related to any senators and had not served in any magistracy.
This at times helped reach fairer outcomes but more regularly allowed skilled orators to "arouse irrelevant prejudice": Cicero, for example, "pulled the wool over the eyes of the jury in his defence of Cluentius" in part by insinuating that the prosecutrix was a murderer and hated her son for unnatural reasons.
[30] Moreover, the proliferation of courts hearing different kinds of actions was clumsy and inconvenient; this was not helped by the formulaic system of fixed penalties that drove juries to pick between the two extremes of exile and acquittal.
A few years later, the plebeian tribune Marcus Plautius Silvanus introduced jury pools selected by each tribe in 89 BC but all these changes were reverted by Sulla during his dictatorship.
Many scholars have interpreted this act, consistent with descriptions from Dio, to have removed the poorer first class from the juries, leaving only the extremely wealthy senators and equestrians.
