(01-25-2021, 08:18 PM)the python Wrote: It is very easy for the criminal code to be taken in bad faith as no sentence recommendations exist! Therefore I am drafting this to fix that. So, here it is!

Criminal Code

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2. Punishments
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(3) If found guilty of any other crime listed above, the Judiciary will determine a sentence. The sentence must be proportionate to the offense., and if it involves a ban, the ban must be shorter than:

a. 2 years for Identity fraud, Blackmail, Extortion and Defamation
b. 1 year for Espionage and Electoral Fraud
c. 6 months for Contempt of court, Corruption, Bribery and Whistleblower Outing
d. 3 months for Vexatious Charges

(4) The Judiciary cannot take these things into consideration when determining a sentence:
a. Out-of-character posts or actions
b. Other crimes that the defendant has been convicted of - these must be dealt with separately
c. Crimes in regions other than the South Pacific

Things that the Judiciary may take into consideration include but are not limited to:
d. The severity of the actions of the defendant
e. Whether or not the defendant admits to the crimes they have been convicted of

As a tl;dr, this draft imposes the maximum sentences on crimes and things that the Judiciary is not allowed to consider when determining a sentence to ensure fairness.

There are a quite a few problems I see with article 4... article 3 is a good base for a... possibly bad (or at least cumbersome - I'll get to that at the end) law, but the rest...
 

Quote:a. Out-of-character posts or actions

I don't think you understand what "Out-of-character" means in the south pacific. Out of character means discussion outside your character in the roleplaying category of this forum. Pretty much every single crime in the history of the south pacific (except maybe extreme actions in the roleplay, I don't think those have been actual crimes before) has happened out of character. You can't do electoral fraud (the crime in this law, not a roleplay version) in the roleplay, because the entire political system happens outside of the roleplay and laws we make here do not affect it.

(I understand this is confusing, because it is, so my tip would be to just pretend the roleplay doesn't exist and don't use terms such as "out of character". The roleplay matters as much to our laws as a random person playing a board game with friends in the off-topic section of the forum. It matters to a lot of people a lot more than that, but not to the laws.)
 

Quote:b. Other crimes that the defendant has been convicted of - these must be dealt with separately

This... well it applies in a multitude of ways, good and bad:

• Sentencing someone off of a previous crime that they've already been tried for is obviously terrible (and illegal!).
  
• Giving people higher sentences because they're a recurring offender is perfectly fine, and this would stop that.
  
• Giving people sentences for multiple crimes would be more confusing and unfair if the Judiciary were forced to consider them separately without context of the others.
  

As Kringle said, it's impossible to legislate the specifics of how sentences are formed because they depend on a huge number of factors - so this should go.
 

Quote:c. Crimes in regions other than the South Pacific

This should be discussed a bit more. Do we claim extraterritorial jurisdiction on certain crimes in certain circumstances?

For example, if a member of our ministry of foreign affairs or our military commits a crime in another region, shouldn't we prosecute them ourselves?

This is especially important in nationstates where these officials (especially the military) can't be prosecuted by those other regions. This isn't like real life where if you commit a crime in the UK or Mali or Japan or Argentina (shout out to economic nerds who get that - I'm not that much of a nerd though, for the record) the police there can arrest you just as well as a police in your home country can arrest you. The only thing that region can do is ban you, which will rarely affect you since the chance you're going to be in an operation in that region (if it's small) again is pretty small. 

In this situation, which isn't too fanciful (the scope of "one of our officials doing something illegal somewhere else" is pretty wide), we wouldn't be able to prosecute them under this situation, which is bad since we're the only ones who can do that to our own officials and the regions who are subject to this won't be happy that those people might not even be fired.
 

Quote:Things that the Judiciary may take into consideration include but are not limited to:
d. The severity of the actions of the defendant
e. Whether or not the defendant admits to the crimes they have been convicted of

This is a bit of a half arsed list, though I understand if you didn't have much time to make it. I'd say "go full out with this or bust" but honestly this kind of thing is best set by court precedent and guidelines formed by previous court cases, for reasons mentioned above.

All of this text wall is to say (sorry): Article 4 here isn't really a good base for a law (I define that as being made to solve a problem - as long as there is an idea in the article which is trying to solve a relatively important problem in a feasible way, there is a base upon which, with some tweaking, a good law can be built). 

I'd also like to add that while Article 3 is perhaps a good idea, I'm thinking that even the simplified version probably isn't:

• These maximum sentences are a bit arbitrary and everyone has their idea on a reasonable upper limit
  
• Even if a reasonable upper limit is established, it sets up a frame of reference for these sentences which may bias them towards being higher.
  

While it makes sense to have it in real life, since there's a lot less accountability in real judiciary systems so it makes sense to limit the power of (especially smaller) judiciaries to give out extreme sentences (that's why special courts exist to handle large cases like terrorism - and also why there are so many appeal courts in real life). Meanwhile, in TSP, we only have one Judiciary and it's extremely accountable and easy to find information from and contribute to - so this isn't even really needed.