The civil and criminal responsibility of magistrates was enforced by the same courts and the same processes by which ordinary citizens were tried. The only privilege which they enjoyed was that, as a rule, they could not be tried for a criminal offence during their year of office, and that none but the magistrates without the _vocatio_ and _prensio_ (i.e. the quaestors and aediles) could be summoned into the praetor’s court.[792] There was no special category of political offences which the magistrate alone could commit, although it is true that he was more specially liable than ordinary citizens to be tried for certain crimes; his greater capacity for doing harm to the state by cowardice or ignorance would expose him more than the ordinary citizen to a charge of _perduellio_; but the _judicium populi_ tried him as a citizen, not as a magistrate, and the general rule that a magistrate was exempt from prosecution during his year of office made him, in fact, a _privatus_ when he stood his trial. The commission of delicts, which were not cognisable by the popular courts, would have brought him before the ordinary civil tribunals. If he robbed a citizen, it was _furtum_; if he assaulted him in a manner not justified by his power of _coercitio_, it was _injuria_. There was indeed one delict which only a magistrate or an official could commit—appropriation of the state funds. In very early times this may have been brought under the expansive conception of _perduellio_, and punished criminally.[793] A few early laws, such as the fifth century _lex de ambitu_, were directed exclusively against magistrates or candidates for a magistracy; these laws doubtless specified the penalty to be imposed,[794] but their interpretation was left to the ordinary organs of criminal justice, the _comitia_.