On Sat, May 13, 2023 at 2:59 PM Janet Cobb via agora-discussion wrote: > > A proto to revive the criminal court, revive the appellate court (but > only for criminal cases), and fix investigators' obligations with > respect to alleged infractions:
So, for a full criminal trial resulting in Blots, in this draft I count 5 "timely fashion" delays: 1 for Referee to respond to a Note with a CFJ, 1 for Arbitor to assign the CFJ, 1 for judgement time, 1 (fixed full week) for the judgement to be in effect to allow for appeals, and 1 for the Arbitor to execute the penalty. Did I get that right? And that's before any appeals, extensions, motions - wow. If this were a real world life-changing criminal matter, absolutely - the wheels of justice should grind slowly. But is that what we want here? As a defendant, I might take a plea deal and ask the referee for "guilty via investigation" no matter what I thought, just so I could pay off the fine and not have it suddenly appear weeks later. The timeline can probably be condensed a bit, but more generally, I was not a huge fan of the earlier Criminal Court (I was not Arbitor until after it was repealed, so this is an "as a general player at the time" opinion, at least as much as possible from this distance). It tended to drag out resolution through a cumbersome criminal trial, which tended to exacerbate/prolong tensions long after most people had stopped caring and wanted to move on. It might be fun to roleplay a criminal trial on occasion, but that was outweighed by the fact that it generally left people at odds with each other (genuinely bristling at each other) longer than need be. Even if the referee is a first filter as in this draft, such that most cases don't go to trial, it's an awful lot of rules complication/length for something that happens relatively rarely? I think I'd want to have a better discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve by criminal penalties that involve full trials (if the achievement is "it's fun to try some criminal procedure in our game" that's fine, but it's worthy of getting on the same page about). In particular, one lack of the current system in my mind is no effective way to prevent immediate "cheating to win" - but this draft exacerbates that issue, as a defendant has a much longer time window without blots to win while the trial is unfolding. I absolutely think, following the recent discussion, that we need to let the investigator "pause" an investigation to defer to CFJ, or otherwise procedurally make the pieces work more smoothly. And it would be nice to bring Apologies back, for when the sentencing is finished. And better address "illegal" wins. But the current CFJ (inquiry case) model feels like it gets to the bottom of the controversy fairly quickly; at least, it did for the instances of the past week that have been resolved, with the only real issue being the investigator's weird timing issues. Does some version of a full trial and appeals system get us there in a better way, do you think? -G.
