By: Joachim Urbański, Peldak Senator
Date: 47 AP
****
Different societies develop different methods of handling crime.
The kinds of laws one society makes to keep their citizens in line eventually become common sense to the people living there. To go from your society, with your common sense, to a foreign planet, and their foreign sensibilities, will inevitably be a shock to the system. You could run afoul of the law on accident, or let your guard down and be victimized by something you didn’t realize was considered perfectly legal.
To prevent this, the Senate of the Peldak Protectorate has established the Senatorial Committee for a Unified Legal System. It’s our primary job to work with local leaders of allied nations to establish a uniform law code that works for everyone. Our secondary duty is to standardize the process for handling the citizens of one society that break the laws of another.
To begin this endeavor, we’ve researched the basic points on how our eight societies handle laws and crime. This overview should provide a baseline set of knowledge for further tests and analysis.
Sayran
The simplest of these law systems is the sayran.
The sayran generally divide themselves into small nomadic tribes, and small petty kingdoms around the many oases that dot their homeworld.
Crimes committed within a tribe are rare, but are usually settled through mediation among the whole tribe. There is no formal justice system, or sense of crime, it’s just that everyone has a general idea of what’s right and wrong. The sayran learn to copy the adults around them, and if they make mistakes as children, are then scolded by their parents until they grow into learning the correct behavior. The sayran use a simple system of peer pressure and social condemnation to keep the people of their tribe in line, and their tribes are so close knit that it works well.
The worst crime seen in the average sayran tribe would be someone shirking their duties to the tribe. They ride on large beetles across an endless desert, so anyone failing to work for the tribe is dead weight, which could spell the end for the tribe. In those cases, if the perpetrator of laziness continues to offend, the only option is to expel them from the tribe. Should they be expelled in the middle of the desert, it’s almost certainly a death sentence.
But what of crimes committed between two or more tribes? During gathering points at the oases?
Generally it’ll be solved through single combat in their grand, gladiatorial arenas. One tribe will accuse another tribe of wrongdoing (the actions of one member reflect on the entire tribe) and the issue will be settled through combat, typically to first blood. This, admittedly, creates a system where the larger and more powerful tribes generally feel free to do whatever they want without a care.
However there is a soft limit to their ability to abuse that power.
Sayran society is ruled by the Sayran Council, administered by the High Chief. Made up of the greatest and most influential tribes, with the Batal Kibir (the single strongest warrior of the sayran) acting as the enforcer of their will. The Council and High Chief form the closest of what passes for a central government. Almost all sayran tribes pledge their loyalty to the Council, or to the tribes that sit on the Council.
If the larger tribes abused the smaller ones too much, then the Sayran Council would lose its legitimacy, and there would be rebellions. Everyone understands that, so in the interests of protecting their power, the tribes of the Council work to keep each other in check, sometimes lending their warriors to their smaller, allied tribes to protect them from abuse.
Duels only work in solving matters between two tribes, and the sayran have no real concept of three-way duels, or large-scale fights involving multiple combatants. In incidences involving three or more tribes, the right of arbitration is left to the Sayran Council, and their word is final. To disobey the ruling of the Council is to invite disaster through the Batal Kibir.
Firryans
The nomadic firryans have a system similar to the sayran, making use of social pressures to keep their people in line. Though there are key differences between the two, such as the firryans having no grand council or high chief.
The firryan brain is fundamentally wired such that it’s nearly impossible for them to commit crimes against close friends and family. To harm your tribe is an alien concept to the nomads, like willingly cutting off your own hand, and only the seriously ill would even consider it. Due to the simple thought of committing a crime against your tribe being so foreign, the remedy of those intrusive thoughts is intervention, love, and support.
That thought even extends between tribes with similar migration patterns, often sharing a history of collaboration and inter-marrying. This makes the firryan nomads the safest clump of societies in the Protectorate by a wide margin.
To clarify, those feelings of being unable to commit crimes to not extend to: Cosmopolitan firryans (who hunted the nomads, enslaved them, and sold them to the relgi for thousands of years), aliens, or other firryan tribes during one of their infrequent religious conflicts. When dealing with strangers, the nomads can be just as brutal as any other.
The cosmopolitan firryans have a legal system on loan from the relgi. It was the relgi who built the city of Foregone thousands of years ago, and they’re the ones who set up the basic foundations for their society.
Perhaps due to their history of abducting their fellow firryans, the cosmopolitans don’t have nearly that same level of aversion to harming their brothers and sisters. That sense is still there, but it really only extends to the various districts of the city. Don’t harm the people who live on your street, feel free to harm those that live on other streets, and harassing nomadic firryans is encouraged. Similarly, aliens have become a more prominent sight on the streets of Foregone, arriving in great numbers as tourists ever since the reconstruction efforts were finished following the Founding War. While crimes against these tourists have been nothing so dramatic as murder or abduction, there has been a notable level of theft, fraud, vandalism, and intimidation.
Given the stunning beauty of the average firryan, it should come as no surprise that the increase in tourism correlates perfectly with an increase in sex crimes. In recent years, as a counter reaction, there’s been a sharp rise of vigilante beatings against tourists who can’t keep their hands to themselves. Some of these beatings might not have been justified, but they’re often covered up by the locals.
The cosmopolitans deal with crime through a dozen city-appointed clerks, investigators, judges, lawyers, and a system of juries. Clerks handle dates and times for court cases. Investigators search for evidence condemning the accused. Judges are basically just ceremonial, making sure the results of the trial are official and sanctioned by the city. Lawyers argue against the accused criminal to a jury. Juries are assembled with random representatives from each district of the city and, after hearing all the facts of the case, decide if the accused is guilty. In practice, lawyers often rely on charm or character assassination to convince the jury of what they want, and it only sometimes relies on evidence from the case.
Each district of Forgone also possesses their own set of investigators and lawyers. Their job is to exonerate the residents of their district no matter the circumstance. The firryan brain works such that, even if the district knows for a fact that the accused is guilty, they’re still compelled to defend their brother or sister.
To the cosmopolitan firryans, there is no law against covering up the crimes committed by someone in your district. In fact, social customs dictate that you’re compelled to help them, no matter how grievous the crime. This is simply a quirk of firryan biology, and rather than deny or try to suppress it, the system is built with this biological imperative in mind.
The city has a single unified law code which is standard across all districts of Foregone. All lawyers must be proficient in the rules within.
Relgi
There are dozens of different cultures and societies around the world, but all legal systems are generally similar to the one seen among the cosmopolitan firryans. We’ll focus on the system found in the state of Tendor, the nation we fought and annexed during the Founding War.
There’s a judge and a jury, lawyers for both sides, and investigators to find the facts of the case. The chief difference is that the judge is much less ceremonial to the tendori. The judge decides which facts are relevant to the case, and doesn’t allow the lawyers to pander to the jury and try to influence them. Court cases in Tendor are dull, boring affairs, as this ensures impartiality.
This impartiality is important due to the 11 castes that make up tendori society. Thousands of ethnic groups clustered into the subcontinent, with urban settlements mostly placed along the coasts that are a true melting pot of diversity. As there’s a lot of bad blood between these ethnic groups, the legal system must work with that in mind, and eliminate as much bias as possible. Similarly, there’s a large firryan population (pureblood and mixed) thrown into the pile, and the tendori aren’t immune to the charms of their former slaves.
While all pureblood firryans were enslaved prior to our war of emancipation, mixed firryans were of the caste of their tendori parent. A mixed firryan lawyer who retained the unnatural beauty of their enslaved parent, pitted against a tendori lawyer, would be at a fundamental advantage. He or she could effortlessly flash their charms to the jury and get their desired verdict, regardless of evidence. Hundreds of years ago, there was a slew of court cases where firryan slaves were on trial, and they acted all cute and innocent, charming the jury and making a conviction impossible.
Ever since the obvious reforms that followed, tendori trials have had a standard uniform of bulky robes and face masks. No visible flesh, no expressions for manipulation. Court etiquette goes so far that most judges require you to speak in dull, monotone voices without a hint of emotion.
Reinforcing this, the jury’s decision must also be unanimous, rather than a simple majority.
It should also be noted that the full-blooded firryans on Relgan, and especially their half-blooded descendants, do not possess their cousins’ complete aversion to committing crimes against their neighbors. They’d find it impossible to harm their immediate family members, but most people would find that difficult. As such, aiding criminals is against the law, as you would expect.
Despite our efforts to resettle the former slaves back on Foregone, hundreds of thousands decided to remain in Tendor.
While this legal system might make sense to emulate for an interstellar scale, it’s worth noting that tendori society has a caste system, and there exists fairly strict rules for how the castes can interact with each other. A comprehensive dive into their caste system is beyond the scope of this examination, just know that they have different rules for different groups, and what is illegal to members of one caste might be fine for another. Trials involving members of different castes are still attempted to be done without bias, but it’s often impossible to avoid mentioning the castes of the parties involved, and juries necessarily must be composed of members of the higher caste. Regardless, throughout their history, even slaves have managed to win disputes against members of the highest caste.
Peldak
Finally, the legal system which actually makes sense.
Our method of dealing with crime is derived from God Himself, after He sent His angels, and even His Son, down to give us guidance and save us from our own violence and ignorance.
Now, there’s a lot of factors at play here. Our system is over 3,000 years old and has continually been tweaked and adjusted over time. It’s to be expected that things are a little complicated.
The first thing that needs to be clarified is our understanding of what a law is.
Laws, basically, spell out how a moral person should operate in society.
People (though peldaks more than most) are violent, chaotic beings that need a firm hand to keep them safe from not only each other, but from themselves. In the same way you’d step in if a man was about to jump off a bridge, the state needs to, with the consent of the Church, step in and keep a man from sinning, or harming himself through his own ignorance.
As such, codified in a massive, multi-volume law code, there are rules dictating just about everything. Rather than a solid bedrock to determine what is and isn’t moral, we’ve gone ahead and spelled out exactly how morality works in just about every possible instance.
But there’s two types of law. Religious law is about how a moral peldak should conduct himself in public, ranging from basic manners to complex moral dilemmas. Civil law defines non-morality issues, such as how taxes should be collected, what side of the road someone should walk on, how the schooling system is set up, etc. Should there be a mix up and these two types of laws contradict each other, religious law takes precedence.
The first thing that needs to be stated is that, while the law code is expansive and encompasses every possible situation one could find himself in, peldaks value the spirit of the law rather than the letter. Where the perfidious cirathan might desperately look for a loophole, or play word games to get out of trouble, the straightforward and honest peldak could effortlessly defeat such efforts with an appeal to common sense.
That being said, we also understand that nobody wants to sit down and read dozens of volumes worth of legal jargon. The layman’s law code is a simplified, one-book list of the most important laws one would find relevant to their average, commoner lifestyle. Simplified, one or two word definitions such as ‘don’t take things that don’t belong to you’, or ‘don’t set buildings on fire’. If a peldak possesses a functioning common sense, the layman’s law code is enough to get through day to day life. If common sense isn’t enough, then the full law code details the maximum allowable punishment for the offender. The layman’s lawn code is so digestible that it’s even taught to children during their education, and there’s a refresher course every year.
Every peldak, regardless of their station, is subject to the same laws.
Enforcement of these laws differs depending on what social class you’re in, however.
For the higher-ups of society, such as senators, generals, nobles, politicians, and bureaucrats, they’re kept in check by a group known as the censors. These men are high-ranking priests who’ve been trained in civil law, and their job is to keep a watchful eye over the state and make sure its actors stay within the bounds of morality. Should a censor find issue in the way a high-status man has been conducting himself, then it becomes a trial where several censors (but not the one who brought the issue up) are appointed to discuss the potential wrongdoing. If the high-status man is found guilty, then they’ll doll out the appropriate punishment as written within the law code.
For the laymen of society, the common man, they don’t have to worry about the censors analyzing their every move. They’re free to go about their days as they normally do, until they’re accused of a crime.
There are three ways to deal with crime for laymen.
The first type is confession. All the little, day to day offenses we commit, such as not opening the door for your wife, putting your trash in the wrong bin, swearing in front of a child, or the offenses you probably committed but didn’t realize at the time. You go to a priest, confess, God forgives you, then the priest gives you some way to atone for your crimes. These types of confessions are rarely serious enough to warrant more than a month or two of community service. Typically, you’d be ordered to abstain from meat and alcohol for a few days. Though, peldaks have been known to confess to murders or blasphemy from time to time, which naturally requires a harsher punishment for atonement.
The second method Is hierarchical. Depending on where you live, the mayor/governor/lord needs to correct some aspect of your behavior or conduct. Say your boss thinks you’re being lazy at work. He’d go to the proper authorities, accuse you of being lazy, then the appropriate official would arbitrate. He would hear both sides, then have unilateral authority to decide if you are lazy, reprimand you for it, then decide the best course of action to fix your behavior. Other examples would be flaunting your wealth, acting rude, being too weak, fighting too much, shirking your duties to your family, or skipping out on necessary civil service work.
The third category of crime is state crime. These would be banditry, or the murders nobody confesses to, or organized crime. Basically, any wrongdoing which requires an investigation to figure out who did it. Usually, the perpetrators are killed in the process of capturing them, but if they live, then a censor would be appointed to figure out why they did it, and doll out the appropriate punishment.
Beyond the upper classes and laymen, there are also laws specific to those in the military.
Soldiering laws relate to how they conduct a war. Dealing with wounded enemies, handling civilians, how to loot after battles, how to accept surrenders, things like that. Most laws of this type revolve around how a soldier needs to act when not in battle. When in the heat of combat, almost anything goes. Morality doesn’t apply when two men are trying to kill each other, and the two most important things for a peldak to worry about is not dying, and making sure his friends don’t die. Be as pragmatic as possible, use any tactic necessary, and follow the orders of your superior officer. That’s all a soldier needs to worry about. No matter what order the officer gives, a soldier is expected to carry it out. If it was a bad order, then the officer will face the consequences later. Each individual soldier can’t be expected to pause and mull over the legal and ethical ramifications of every action.
Ultimately, for men and women across all stations of peldak life, the most important thing is that we’re all going to fail.
There’re a great many laws detailing every facet of society. These laws outline a sort of ‘ideal man’, the absolute peak of what a peldak could hypothetically achieve. The most moral person.
The only man to ever live up to this ideal, the man through whom each law gains its legitimacy, is Hananiah Vendall; the Son of God who was sent down to save us from our own sins.
For the rest of us, it’s expected that we’ll fall short of some or even most of the laws we’ve written down. We’re a people who’ve fallen from grace, we are violent, we are aggressive, tempers do flare. That’s why laws have a maximum allowable punishment, but no minimum.
Sometimes two peldaks start an argument, it escalates, then before you know it, a riot has set half the city on fire. Are you supposed to punish everybody for throwing rocks through windows? Of course not. Just tell everyone to go home, and if they don’t, send in the soldiers to break a few bones. There’s really nothing you can do about it.
Cirathans
Let’s get this over quick.
There’s a judge. Who the judge is depends on the specific city state. It could be the king of the city, or the elected representative, or the richest man, or whatever. The leader of each city’s main job is to keep things more or less fair, acting as a sort of referee. There’s a baseline for what counts as criminal behavior, like violence being forbidden, but cirathans are cowardly, weak, and would sell their own mothers for a slight profit, so there’s rarely any court cases like that.
In the rare criminal trials, the city will appoint a prosecutor, the accused will defend himself, and the judge will decide if he’s guilty. There will also be a large audience of citizens watching, as these sorts of high-stakes trials are fun for them. Given cirathan eyesight, all the prosecutor has to do is make the accused nervous enough to make their guilt plain in their body language. Supposedly the audience gets mad if the judge rules against what they believe to be the truth, so it’s also a system that’s slightly dependent on mob rule.
If two people have a business disagreement and can’t work it out, they’ll take it before a judge and… talk about how they’re in the right.
Any contract can be wriggled out of, no law exists that doesn’t have a loophole, it’s entirely dependent on who can talk to the judge better.
Cirathan ‘business sense’ is really just a game of who can screw each other over the best. No reason to honor deals, no loyalty, the only thing you can trust a cirathan on is that he’ll stab you in the back (metaphorically) the second he thinks it’ll benefit him.
In incidents between members of two different city states, such as a merchant from City State A committing blatant fraud against a citizen of City State B, where the trial is held is usually determined based on bribery. Each member of the dispute wants the trial to be held in their homeland, so they’ll both try to pay off the opposing leader to waive that trial. I.E. the merchant paying off the leader of City State B to say he has no interest in conducting the trial, thus ensuring it’s held in the merchant’s home. But that can be expensive, and cirathans hate wasting money. It’s a self-regulating system where a wealthy cirathan will be expected to pay a higher bribe, so there’s a soft limit on how much fraud can be committed.
Monsoorai
The monsoorai are a legalistic people with a long history that stretches further back than even Pelda.
To explain, their civilization is at least 5,000 years old. Throughout that time there’s been countless dynasties, ruling families, political reforms, rebellions, and civil wars. Monsoorai history is cyclical, with their people being united under a single state, that state collapsing, being united again, then breaking apart once more.
Currently, the monsoorai are in a period of disunity, with our ally of Asean not even being the largest state on the planet. But to the average monsoorai, and especially the outside observer, the various states trying to unify the people are just political differences. The rulers might be different, but the language, culture, and institutions are interchangeable.
It’s said that, if a monsoorai from four thousand years ago woke up today, he’d find it remarkably easy to adjust to his new life. This is speaking culturally, like how their language is mostly unchanged, as technological progress and the existence of the Protectorate would be a fairly jarring shift.
One such institution which has remained largely unchanged for the better part of three thousand years is that of the monsoorai legal system.
The central bureaucracy of the state is responsible for training judges and lawyers. There are large academies dedicated solely to teaching the law, and their legal code is so expansive that there’s actually different lawyers and judges for different types of crimes. No one lawyer could know the ins and outs of every law, so they have to specialize. The monsoorai have developed a great memory due to a long history of memorizing wind patterns, island locations, and fish migrations, but even they can’t be expected to understand the full breadth of monsoorai law.
There are various types of specializations such as contract disputes, civil lawsuits, misdemeanor crimes, felony crimes, dynastic tyranny laws, and dozens more. We’ll focus on crime lawyers, as the others aren’t relevant to this examination.
For crime lawyers, there’s a type dedicated to prosecutions, and a type dedicated to defending. The prosecutors work with law enforcement to bring charges against citizens, and the defenders advocate on behalf of the alleged criminal. Both sides get their budget from the central government, and the lawyers receive bonuses if they win the case, so they all have a vested interest in giving it their all. This does have the potential of corruption, such as falsifying evidence or bribing the judge, but there are harsh laws against that, so it’s not as big of a problem as it otherwise could be.
Judges also get paid by the central government, and they get paid regardless of the outcome of the trial, ensuring impartiality. However, judges get paid by the number of trials they conduct. This has led to a small issue where they rush through rulings without always hearing the full facts of the case. The monsoorai would argue it’s a necessary trade-off to ensure justice is passed out quickly, and a knee-jerk ruling based on first impressions is better than every ruling being agonized over for weeks.
Despite the existence of multiple states claiming legitimacy as the rightful monsoorai leaders, the courts are unchanged. Besides funding, they’re largely independent of the ongoing power struggle, and any monsoorai can be tried in any court around the planet. The average monsoorai has such a deep reverence and respect for their legal institutions that any claimant attempting to influence or bribe the courts would suffer a severe loss in legitimacy.