More Questions on Imperial Law

General
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1

I’ve been mulling over some questions about Imperial Law; some about Misprision, and some about Ignorance/Not Knowing of the Crime.

Firstly, on Misprision of Felony:

  • If one either was at the time, or is currently, under the age of Majority, are they bound to the same degree to identify and report such crimes?
    • Under certain particularly unpleasant circumstances, this could also overlap with
  • If, though they themselves are not a victim of the crime in question, to report- or attempt to do so- the crime would be to invite immediate peril and/or harm on oneself would they still be held guilty of misprision. For instance, if the perpetrator in question is their primary (or only) caregiver, or would be able to retaliate (or could reasonably be feared to do so) before the response is carried out. For that matter, how immediate and/or probable would said peril of harm have to be in order to so qualify as such?
  • (for past crimes) If the local government at the time would have been… less than reasonable about such a report, whether for reasons related or unrelated to the report in question, would they still be held in violation, assuming that they attempt to report it relatively promptly after the change in the government in question? For that matter, what would be the determination were they to have, in the interim, forgotten entirely about the incident in question?

Now, for my second set of questions, regarding Ignorance of Misdeeds.

  • How closely is the modal Imperial expected to monitor and investigate goings-on within their family, workplace, community, or other such group, insofar as remaining vigilant for any misdeeds, potential or actual, is concerned?
  • For that matter, if they are told by a figure whom they believe to be trustworthy that there is nothing untoward going on, but they have some prior suspicion of something being amiss, are they obligated to investigate further? If so, to what degree?
    • If they do not know for sure whether an ongoing event is legal or not, but are told by a trusted person that it is legitimate, even though it is not, would they be held liable, in part or in whole, for allowing the activity to continue and not investigating further?

Edit 2: Let us assume that the person in question only find out about a crime at some later point in time, whether due to deception by another (that said person has cause to consider to be trustworthy, an beyond any need for secondary verification of their statements), due to misidentifying the evidence thereof as being something innocuous or otherwise of no consequence, or due to not knowing that looking for evidence of such is necessary. Let us then assume that this person brings the evidence of wrongdoing to light promptly, modulo any time spent attempting to better ascertain the nature of the crime, or any time spent in order to establish contact with Law Enforcement. Suppose that the time of the crime is established to have occurred some time before it was reported and that, had they thought to more thoroughly investigate their surroundings, or to verify the statements of the allegedly trustworthy party, that they would have discovered the crime significantly earlier than they ultimately had. To what degree would, or could, they be held accountable for being insufficiently vigilant in their actions?

Alternatively, suppose that the failure to discover it more promptly is due to some personal malaise, or due to some level of distraction with other tasks at hand. Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that the extraneous tasks in question were neither trivial nor entirely superfluous or unnecessary, but neither were they so time-sensitive nor so critical that they could not have been delayed.

Now, let us change slightly the parameters of the situation. The incident, or evidence thereof, does not go entirely unnoticed. However, it is either misidentified as something innocuous, or it is not recognized as something of importance. How culpable would they be for failing to investigate and then to report the matter?

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Ah, you seem a mite confused on how things work thereabouts in general. So let’s start:

There is no such thing as an age of majority in the Empire.

“Majority”, such as it is, depends on a case-by-case comparison of your proposed/actual actions against your self-signed tort insurance, which grows throughout your childhood until you hit the IQI[1] threshold at which point you may be considered a fully competent sophont for legal purposes, conveniently identified as when you’re considered competent enough to assume citizen-shareholdership.

(It is generally believed, there, that treating children as definitional incapable incompetents for their entire childhoods and then turning them loose with full powers the moment the right birthday arrives does not, ahem, “produce optimal outcomes”.)

So far as misprision of felony is concerned: were you competent enough to identify the thing you saw as a crime and to make a report? The court will adjudicate that based on the usual thresholds[2].

Unlike some police forces, the Watch Constabulary is not made up of incompetents, and even more to the point, unlike anywhere hopelessly barbaric enough to pass Castle Rock v. Gonzales or Warren v. District of Columbia, actually do have an enforceable duty to protect the public[3]. Not merely as an abstraction, either, but as specific individuals.

If you report a crime, you will be protected from its perpetrator to whatever extent is necessary, beginning immediately.

  1. Insurance Quota for Independence. ↩︎

  2. And the context. If you’re eight, you probably aren’t in a position to understand complex securities fraud, but if someone gets stabbed in front of you, you can reasonably be expected to figure that one out. Or, as in one case we’ve seen in canon, if someone extorts someone else’s lunch money. ↩︎

  3. In Imperial practice, for example, the Empire makes whole the victims of crime within its jurisdiction before and without regard to arrest and trial of a criminal, simply because having asserted its jurisdiction over crime within Imperial territory, the existence of crime therein demonstrates a failure on its part. ↩︎

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There aren’t local governments, either. The Empire isn’t a federal system - it’s the Imperial Service all the way down. (What looks like a local governance is the local supervisory authority in the form of the runér, their staff, and their advisory assembly. They are entitled to have local laws that do not conflict with global laws, per Section IV, Article I, but those are still carried out by the Service. And when Calmiríë says “frog”, they hop.)

Not at all.

In fact, let me stop you right there, because you’ve grossly misunderstood the purpose of misprision. It’s there to provide guidance for what to do when and if you become aware of a crime, in order to provide an easy path to fulfil one’s obligations as a citizen and to avoid becoming an accessory after the fact.

It is absolutely not there to turn everyone into government snoopers and informers. That’s some Stasi-esque bullshit that doesn’t belong in a civilized society.

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NOTE: I have been… limited in my access to the website, writing this mostly in the text processor on my computer, going off of solely what I can recall of Mr. Young’s responses and my own original questions. Nevertheless, I will respond as well as I can to his responses, in an attempt to try to clarify. If I am referencing something from either of those incorrectly, please call me out on it.

Also, possibly response 1/?

Regarding the first set of questions (with regards to Misprision of a Felony) as a whole: The first and third of these in particular, but also for the first set as a whole, I was primarily considering in the context of a would-be outside applicant for citizenship within the Empire, wherein it either comes up during examination(?) for their worthiness to become a citizen, or at some other point prior to officially (and legally) obtaining citizenship. I cannot check at the moment, but I seem to recall it mentioned that most, if not all, crimes (felonies and misdemeanors) that the would-be outside applicant is convicted of would be (at least potentially, though that also depends on how cautious/exacting the people handling your case are) disqualifying of an applicant, not even for citizenship, but for entering the Empire at all. See Welcome to the Empire, but also Section Three of the Imperial Charter. The exception, of course, being those that they do not recognize as being crimes.

Does it so follow that the same may apply to those crimes which the Empire recognizes as such, even if the outside applicant’s original polity either does not consider to be crimes, or that the polity merely never prosecuted or charged the applicant for? See An Earthling’s Guide to Not Criming as well as, again, Section Three of the Imperial Charter. Whether the latter is out of ignorance/not knowing, due to insufficient resources, due to corruption, or for any number of other reasons. After all, it does not change the fact that the relevant (in)action is a crime, and that the applicant did, in fact, precisely that. The person in question can make reparations for it, to be sure, and the Curia does accept different levels of intent as reasons to increase or decrease the reparations thereof. Still, the person who did it will always have done it.

  • Thus, it is unclear whether their past actions in this case could- or would- be held as a black mark against them in the present. After all, even making one’s misdeeds right, or even being forgiven for them, does not change the fact that the person did, at one point, do them.
  • For the second and third scenarios, some might also consider their resolve/willpower to be lacking for doing so. Alternatively, it might be considered to be a failing or a fault, or sign thereof, on the applicant’s part, a (metaphorical) weakness of the spine, or knees, or both. After all, what self-respecting Imperial would ever bend in the face of threats or coercion? Not a single one, at least not if they can avoid it, is my understanding of the situation.
    • Would they, after all, have any reason not to hold any prospective citizen to the same unwavering standards as they would themselves?
  • I’m not sure that even the most critical, exacting or… would unforgiving be the correct term- one who holds any and every failing as a permanent black mark against the person in question, no matter how much/how many times over said person may attempt to offer recompense/reparations? of Imperials would- or even could- find any personal fault in them under the first set of conditions, save insofar as they did, in fact, still fail to report the offense in question.

Regarding the first question out of the first set (Whether mental or emotional immaturity- that is to say, specifically lack of development- could or would absolve one of guilt in respect to Misprision of a Felony): my assumption was that this was a violation or failure which occurred at some unspecified earlier point in time, most likely before the being in question had ever entered the Empire. I do not know whether the expectation that anything will be done to make right the offense plays any role with regard to the applicant’s guilt or innocence of the Misprision of Felony; I suspect not.

  • There is also a potential subset of this, where the applicant did not, at the time, know or understand that the offense in question was such, or that it was, in fact, not normal at all. Such a situation would no doubt be infuriating to many Imperials, particularly if the applicant was the victim of the offense or offenses in question. It does not change, however, the fact that the offense was not reported, whether to the proper authorities or at all.

As for the second question of the first set (whether threat of harm which would be incurred by an attempt to report the felony would absolve one of guilt), my first thought, originally, was someone who was in close proximity to the offenders, but who was not at the moment seen as a threat to their efforts. A family member, perhaps, or even a former colleague experiencing a change of heart, and seeking to bring their former fellow criminals to justice.

  • Admittedly, with the latter example it could be argued that, as reporting on their former allies does not absolve them of their own role in the crime, they are still getting exactly what they deserve. After all, their fellow perpetrators will no doubt meet similar fates soon enough. Thus, balance is maintained, and justice is ultimately upheld for all of the offenders.
  • Let us however, for this scenario, assume that the reporter is not involved- whether directly or indirectly, whether willingly or otherwise, with the offenses committed by these perpetrators. Let us, likewise, also assume that the reporter is not in a position where they can feasibly hinder, incapacitate, capture, or eliminate the perpetrator or perpetrators in question. Either without suffering incapacitating injury or body-death (or, in some cases, even thought-death), or at all.
  • If they are close at hand to the perpetrators in question, it is not inconceivable that they could find out- or otherwise determine- that they have been sold out before they are actually taken into custody. Furthermore, in some subset of these cases, the simple act of transmitting a report of the crimes committed would be sufficient to implicate the reporter in being the one to sell them out, so to speak.

Alternatively, any situation where, for instance, light-lag comes into play, it may be minutes or even hours before the perpetrators may be caught and taken into custody. Ships or habs out in the Deep Black would be the most obvious such example, but also isolated or remote locations on planets may fall under this as well.

For the third question of the first set… (whether failing to report a crime to a local/temporal government due to the aforementioned government either not being likely to act on the report, or being more likely to target the reporter for various reasons), I believe it was? The initial assumption of the first question is still potentially applicable for a prospective applicant for citizenship. They, after all, have not likely lived within the Empire for their whole lives.

  • That being said, even for other Imperial citizens this could still come up, or at least for the more well-travelled among them. After all, not everywhere that they are likely to go is a part of the Empire, and not every locale is likely to fully share- or even respect- the worldview and opinions of an Imperial citizen.

  • I will concede that, unless the government in question somehow does not recognize them as an Imperial Citizen, one can presume that they would judiciously avoid targeting any Imperial citizens if they would like their government/settlement/planet to remain in its current condition. After all, the response of the Empire to its citizens being targeted is both clear and well-known, and quite prompt and kinetically violent.

  • Nevertheless, at least on occasion there arise sophs who are sufficiently stupid to think that targeting an Imperial citizen is, if not a good idea, then at least not more trouble than it is worth. They might even fare well enough to (most likely only temporarily, at least by their own actions) incapacitate the citizen in question. However, any such success in that regard would be rather short-lived. After all, in such situations I doubt that the average Imperial would consider being captured alive to be a preferable condition.

  • The prospective citizen, on the other hand, does not have the implicit and explicit protection of the Empire of the Star cloaking them to protect them from reprisal. Most citizen-applicants, particularly those from less-civilized locales, would also tend to lack the means to survive body-loss/death, and/or the ability to extricate their mind-state to safety on (potentially very) short notice.

    • The example that came to mind [NOT NAMING NAMES OR LOCATIONS] was a person, part of a disadvantaged minority within their resident(?) society [NOT POINTING FINGERS], who is targeted, and made the victim of a hate crime, based on them being a part of the aforementioned minority [NO COMMENT ON CURRENT EVENTS]. They refrain from reporting the crime to the local authorities, in the interests of their own personal safety or the safety of their loved ones; either because the perpetrator or perpetrators are of a higher status in their society than their victim and thus would be favored [DELIBERATELY NOT CALLING OUT ANY SPECIFIC PEOPLE, PLS NO HATE] by the authorities (which might even include being informed that the victim reported the crime), or because they fear bringing attention to their membership in the aforementioned minority group may lead to an increase of targeting of themselves [NOT (INTENTIONALLY) ALLUDING TO ANY SPECIFIC RL EVENTS] and/or possibly their loved ones.

  • Someone could absolutely make the case that any self-respecting soph ought to have done something, anything, to at the very least ensure that the perpetrators will/can never do anything of the sort ever again, if not also to ensure that such a slight does not go unanswered, without a commensurate response. After all, doing anything less than that would, at least by the standards of some, make them a coward at best, and an enabler at worst.

    • How prominent is the mindset of “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees” or “Kill them all, or die trying” with respect to such situations? Granted, having resurrective immortality does fundamentally alter the calculus in that regard.

  • That being said, there may be a variety of reasons why the aforementioned citizen-applicant would not attempt anything of the sort. Particularly if they lack any sort of bug-out mechanism should they be overpowered and captured.

  • Contrariwise, at least some of the more well-travelled subset of Imperials, or at least those with a tendency for entering the sketchier parts of the galaxy, not only have that, but also have the ability to go, “Fuck you, I’m taking you all with me,” should things take a turn for the worst case scenario… huh, I wonder whether there are emergency bug-out transmitters with alternative power sources, or is it just AM or bust?

  • That said, there almost certainly are historical examples of Imperials seeking out such vengeance, and likely some even going to truly extraordinary lengths to ensure that no such offense against them (or their loved ones) will go unpunished, which predate that technological innovation. I simply don’t know how representative of the mean such individuals would be.

    • Moreover, I don’t know whether or not, or to what degree, that level of determination to exact recompense would be expected of others- Imperial, potential Imperial-to-be, or otherwise. Nor am I certain as to whether- or to what degree- such a (perceived) failing would be held against someone.

For the second set, one of the major questions on the matter is if someone suspects that something is amiss, but after being told that everything is above-board by someone whom they have significant reason to trust, takes them at their word and does not press the matter further.

I am… not sure whether I am getting my point across, here? Actually, I might be straying far from where this started out.

5

See, at first I misread this as the hypothetical Imperial coming across a group of sophs who were unable to kill all their foes and who would be killed horribly if the Imperial merely slaughtered their slavers, and therefore said Imperial deciding to slaughter the slavers and then abscond back to civilised space with a dozen former slaves.

Which is sure to prove a headache to multiple people later. XD

1 Like
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Depending on the person in question, one which may or may not be caused by a kinetic projectile to the head?

Also, would this (bringing back the rescued slaves, potentially even to the Empire) be the sort of situation where V-class Visas would be used?

7

Not if you’re halfway sane, it isn’t.

A vouchsafe visa pledges your life, fortune, and sacred honor in a very literal sense - “any and all social, civil, and criminal liabilities imposed upon the citizen-shareholder body by he for whom they pledged vouchsafe, even to the extent of wagering their citizen-shareholdership (forfeited should the vouchsafee require deportation) and even, upon occasion, life itself upon their judgment of their vouchsafee’s capacity for good behavior” - for the good behavior of anyone thus admitted.

Promising vouchsafe requires, therefore, that you repose the utmost trust in whoever it is you’re vouching for, especially since you are making the claim that they are of good character directly against the assessment of the professionals working for the IGBV.

How much do you trust these people you just met?

I also remind y’all that just because you’re oppressed, or even enslaved[1], doesn’t mean you’re a good person.

In the spirit of your earlier post’s formatting, one can observe on Earth [CERTAIN GROUP] who have been, certainly, horribly oppressed by [FORMER AND CURRENT GOVERNMENT] which indeed desires to kill many of its members, and yet, when members of [CERTAIN GROUP] are accepted as refugees into [OTHER COUNTRIES], their statistical rate of perpetrating rapes and other sexual crimes is an order of magnitude above the national average.

If an analogy to the V-class visa and the Imperial legal system existed on Earth, exercising the former for members of [CERTAIN GROUP] you saved from horrible oppression would simply mean that after ORE got done throwing them in the lethal chamber, they’d throw you in the lethal chamber for staggeringly poor discernment of character, or more accurately, inflicting the consequences of it on your fellow citizen-shareholders.

  1. The Liberian Lesson. ↩︎

8

With the ‘bringing former slaves’, I suspect it would more be a situation where a comparatively inexperienced adventurer is trying to triage, and is starting with “Step 1: kill the slavers. Step 2: get the victims someplace safe. Step 3: Uh…?” And a lot of the headache is going to be having a group of grateful people that nevertheless have plenty of mental baggage and probably need some psychdesign, and an adventurer who could do with a helping hand directing their ducklings to suitable services.

And then, in future, connecting said adventurer to some organisation that goes out and helps in the regions with a proper plan and backup. After all, everyone starts somewhere and the intent was noble, even if the application needs some fine-tuning.

9

Y’know, just to bring some unwelcome logistics to the table, the very few surviving slaver states anywhere near the center of things (the Theomachy is the only one in the 73 constellations of the Worlds proper) are closed societies careful not to allow people who might be focused on kicking their ass for sport inside their borders. Most of the opportunities for adventurers to engage in casual emancipation are going to be found in the far Expansion Regions or Periphery which, sort of by definition, are a long gorram way from the Core.

So you’ve got to ask yourself some questions about the practicalities of dragging your new emancipatees back home over multiple months of travel time, into a society entirely novel to them, one hell of a long way from everywhere and everything they’ve ever known, including - these being underdeveloped, underintegrated march-worlds - virtually everyone of their own species. And also how much of a favor you’re doing them by so doing.

Good gods, that’s a monster post. I do not have the energy to try and disentangle all its threads, but let’s see.

Well, that would probably explain why various things seemed to make little sense to me.

Let me start - and probably save a lot of distributed dependencies - by explaining how the IGBV interprets the Charter’s interest in “criminality by Imperial legal standards, or widely accepted dyspraxic defect”.

By Imperial legal standards, in this case, means at one level that if it isn’t a crime in the Empire, they don’t care.

(If you did something that is a crime in the Empire but wasn’t in your originating polity, they might care, but they don’t routinely subject everyone passing through a port of entry to full static mind-state analysis[1], rather relying on the aletheometric check on your form I-180 to reveal that you are a mite casual about respecting the rights of your fellow sophonts. In which case you won’t be admitted and there’s no need to inquire any further.)

On the more important meta-level, it means that they care about your character and in particular, that you are honorable, just, and honest. This is what the Imperial legal system, following its ethical system, cares about. Most legal systems care more about compliance, which is a repugnant characteristic for a sophont to have, and as such everything that doesn’t qualify as an Imperial-standard mala in se crime on your record can be unceremoniously tossed out the metaphorical airlock.

Also it is important to bear in mind that while the joys of following regulations in mind-flaying detail regardless of how stupid the result is is common practice in Earth corporations and (especially) government, lest anyone have to use their judgment or, even worse, have to defend their judgment, the Empire takes the view that if you aren’t capable of exercising good judgment, there are plenty of opportunities for you in the outworld box-toting and shovel-wielding industries.

Principles are universal. Their written expansions are not, and trying to apply necessarily incomplete rule sets to an unfathomably complex galaxy is the habit of serfs, lackeys, and brain-worm-eaten lawyers[2]. Context is for kings[3].

(To provide a worked example in the case of out-world misprisions:

  • If you didn’t turn in your homie’s shoplifting gang because he was your bro, bro, and your bro’s bros are your bros, you ain’t no snitch: you fail.
  • If you didn’t report the cartel murder-house to the local cops because the cartel is the de facto government, the cops work for them, and doing so would have resulted in getting you and your entire family dead for no reason: doesn’t count either way. You are not expected to die for no good purpose.
  • If you didn’t report the suspicious Hebrew-resembling text in your neighbor’s book to the Ordnungspolizei: that counts in your favor.

)

Continued later.

  1. Which would be a fairly spectacular violation of the Right of Domain. ↩︎

  2. This is why we have sophont judges. ↩︎

  3. Thank you, Gabriel Lorca. ↩︎

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That being said, to clarify, the public record is fair game. If you were unwise enough to brag about stealing from the evil corporations for social-media karma or let your consensually-dubious locker-room talk out on the extranet, that will be held against you.

(And if the current administration were dumb enough - and you know they are dumb enough - to send our dear self-admitted dog-murderer and Secretary of DHS as an interstellar envoy, the interstellar diplomatic community would doubtless be quite amused at the sight of someone being PNGed before they could so much as present their credence.

(Enjoy your time sitting in the outbound extrality zone with the thin shield of a D2 visa between you and a whole bunch of folk waiting for an excuse.))

Where past actions are concerned (and remember, there is judgment being exercised here, not a strict set of rules), in cases of crimes or cumulative crimes - other than those for which the Empire would have executed them, which is essentially always a firm “no” - the question is not whether they addressed them according to the strict standards of Imperial law, because they weren’t and aren’t signatories to the strict standards of Imperial law.

Yet.

The question is “have you rehabilitated yourself?[1]”, which is a question of current ethics, and that’s a question that will probably be answered to their satisfaction by the aforementioned aletheometric analysis.

On a side note: not all legal systems include the concept of misprision (many of Earth’s don’t), and some of those which do use a weaker definition which includes taking affirmative steps to conceal a crime rather than merely failing to report it.

But in any case, what the Empire cares about isn’t your technical guilt of something that is-or-would-have-been that particular crime in some random galactic legal system. What they care about when something resembling it turns up in your admissions or the public records trawl is whether it demonstrates poor character, and thus what the Charter would call widely accepted dyspraxic defect.

This involves judgment calls!

It involves judgment calls on a lot of levels as to what even is a crime (and justification is a valid defense that can transmute crime to not-crime - you covered up your friend killing that guy, but he needed killing, so that’s okay; you concealed the smuggling activity of the ship you were on, but since they were running food to the starving and weapons to the slaves, ain’t got a problem with that; etc.).

And it also involves judgment calls on other parameters you mention.

They’re strict about misprision for minors at home, because they’re competent products of a good, solid Imperial education whose competence is actively examined and quantified by their tort insurers, et. al.

Someone who’s had to grow up in the crappy end of some crappy barbarian outworld may not be competent in this area or others even now, never mind when they were growing up and prone to assume that the way the world around them was, was normal. They almost certainly were less capable of taking positive action and accepting the consequences. And obviously they didn’t have access to a real, professional police service that could make meaningful guarantees of justice and protection.

All of this is a matter of judgment, because your job, Mr. Inplacement Officer, is to be just in your assessments[2]. Not to be procedurally correct.

(I must again recommend Seeing Like a State; and specifically invite you to consider that we’ve long since settled on Earth for adopting rigorous, one-size-fits-all regulation instead of judgment because, well, we don’t trust people to be able to exercise good judgment. The Empire took great pains to avoid this trap, because the price of not doing so is being horrendously unjust all the time without having the ability to notice that you’re doing it.)

On the third, I’ll merely point out that while heroics may affect your reputation for a while[3], the very fact that you have come from one of those places and are now there, standing in front of the inplacement desk, speaks for your character and your ability to take dynamic, positive action to improve your situation.

If I may be permitted a real-life example, the kind of man who’ll put his family in a bathtub and set off at night to paddle a few hundred miles guided only by the distant lights of Florida is the kind of man who deserves to be an American more than most of us ever will.

And it would be a little unfair, don’t you think, to judge him for failing to overthrow the Castro regime on his way out?

Final specific notes:

Antimatter is compact, efficient, and swift, which is why it is used for that purpose. Most users do not have it double as a spite charge, although the fact that it at the least always irrevocably destroys your brain structure and thus keeps it away from hostile necromancers is a bonus with delivery.

I make the general note that authority relying on authority rather than explaining or pointing at why things are all above-board is, locally, considered a shibboleth and not a merry one. You can take people at their word and people do, but in Imperial culture, it’s customary for people to offer the explanation first.

Of course, you’ve got to learn that, if you’re foreign.

  1. They do, in fact, have the lot of god-damned gall to ask you if you have rehabilitated yourself. ↩︎

  2. This sometimes does lead to such things as: “We are prepared to admit you, conditional on you signing a Confession of Situational Mental Incompetence and accepting oversight pending your undertaking a lot of therapy. ↩︎

  3. Kine die, kin die, etc…. ↩︎