Murder Trials by Cicero

Author:Cicero
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780140442885
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

It is pointed out, in an effort to refute me, that Publius Septimius Scaevola, when his penalty was being assessed after conviction on another totally unrelated charge,1 received a severer assessment on the grounds that he had received a bribe while serving as a judge at the trial of Oppianicus. However, an assessment of penalty is not, strictly speaking, a judicial action. In view of your own great experience, gentlemen, I do not need to explain the nature of this procedure in detail. But I would like to remind you that, in these final stages of a case after the verdict has already been pronounced, judges do not by any means always display the same amount of care that they have devoted to the previous phases of the trial.

When they are assessing penalties, for example, they are inclined to adopt one or two courses. If there has been a demand that the convicted man’s assessment should take the form of a capital penalty,2 they may well turn it down, because they are conscious that they have already made a personal enemy of the defendant just by finding him guilty, and they do not, therefore, want to pursue the matter any further. Or alternatively, under the impression that they have completed their duty by pronouncing the verdict, they do not bother to pay much attention to the aftermath. One thing which sometimes happens is that a man gets acquitted on a treason charge but subsequently convicted on a charge of bribery, and then, when his penalty is assessed for the bribery conviction, the judges make it stiffer because they are still bearing the treason accusation in mind. And there is another phenomenon, too, which we see every day when a panel of judges is assessing a penalty: they incriminate someone for receiving bribes, but subsequently, when the incriminated person is brought to trial, they themselves decide to pronounce him not guilty. When they do this, they are not reversing a judicial decision, for they are admitting, in effect, that an assessment of penalty is not a judicial proceeding at all.

Scaevola was found guilty of charges quite unrelated to the trial of Oppianicus, on the evidence of a large number of witnesses from Apulia. But his penalty was assessed as if he had been found guilty in connexion with Oppianicus’ trial, and, once again as if that had been so, powerful efforts were made to induce the judges to assess his penalty as a capital one. If, however, the assessment had rated as a judicial process, surely his enemies – either these same enemies or others – would have made sure that he was subsequently brought to trial under this very same law under which we are operating today. But that did not happen.

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