Rome at the time was not a democracy. The issue I think was that Pontus Pilate was afraid the people would send a message to Rome that he was a bad governor. That kind of report I vaguely recall would get a governor dismissed and I think sometimes executed. Also religious fanatics (as the super religious people I think were) are not representative of all the Jewish people. I have not thought about the relation of the life and death of Jesus to the question of Democracy but it seems to me that a good deal of American Democracy is based on a long history of thinking about Jesus and natural law and freedom from Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Aquinas, John Locke, and the history of the rise and fall of Athens, and the Roman Republic. It is by no means obvious to me that the story of Jesus tells us something against the kind of Republic that the USA is.
