Grrl Power #924 – Do not taunt happy fun Maxima
Cora is really skirting the edge here, and I’m not really sure why other than it makes me laugh. She does probably have a point about warrantless “wire” taps, especially since she’s using crazy alien tech to tap the A/V feed from someone’s living nervous system. Anything she records would certainly be inadmissible, and there are probably some, you know, privacy concerns.
Her opening word bubble basically boils down to, “Maybe I did a bad, but I definitely did a bunch of goods.” I’m not sure there’s a justice system on Earth that actually balances good deeds out with bad ones. Yeah, there’s character witnesses and judges generally have a lot of leeway in sentencing, but it’s not written down, like a law that says if you’re a doctor and you create a vaccine that saves a million lives, you don’t get 999,999 get-out-of-jail-for-murder cards. Maybe Cora’s thinking of some alien worlds where that is the case, and come to think of it, I’m really surprised I’ve never seen a Star Trek or Doctor Who or something where they visit that planet.
Now that I think about it though, if you lived on that planet and you ran someone over with your car by accident (or murdered your neighbor on purpose, I suppose it doesn’t matter) and you didn’t have a “good” credit, would you go straight to jail, or would you have a year in which you have to save someone’s life, or otherwise accrue enough good credits to balance out the bad? I think a society would quickly figure out that one life for one life simply wouldn’t work. Doctors and firefighters and EMTs could be untouchable serial killers, and I think there’d be a real potential for massive population decline. Plus, there’d probably be services like fake suicide attempts people could “thwart” for good credits so they can go kill their neighbor’s noisy dog or whatever.
Yeah, that system wouldn’t work at all. Still surprised I haven’t seen it on Star Trek.
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Don’t push Max should be a law of physics.
I’m sure she’ll be glad when these aliens are off her planet.
Trouble is, traffic has just begun, I’m sure.
It already is: for every action, there is a (subjectively) equal and opposite reaction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnqpoPSUD5E
No credit for partial answers.
I disagree. Sir Isaac Newton is NOT the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking would definitely compete, but in most sci-fi settings, the winner would be the inventor of FTL drive.
Agreed.
If you’re accelerating an object to a fraction of light speed Newton already has to go ask Einstein for help with the math.
Seems to be a typo in the first panel: Sydey instead of Sydney. Also seems to be one in the 4th panel, assuming you meant “neuro” transmitters instead of nero-transmitters.
I personally was wondering whether “dickback” was an actual insult, or was a typo’d “dickbag”.
IKR? I was having a mental image of an alien with, like, a spinal ridge crest of dicks. (…now I kinda don’t want it “fixed”)
Dickback may just be a slang term they use in space. Cora isn’t from around here after all. She’s bound to have a few colloquialisms that we’ve not heard before.
Does Cora even speak english at all, or is she using a universal translator? I don’t think we’ve been told.
Or it could be a failed attempt at an Earth slur. Maybe she got her English from a translator chip, but that doesn’t mean that translator is 100% correct on everything.
Still, my Internet points are on typo.
that puts ‘the genitals are unveiled’ in a whole new light
Or maybe a dick that points backwards.
The phrase Go Fuck Yourself, takes on a whole new meaning.
I have seen enough hentai with phallic tentacles that shoot out of the back to take this literally.
Whoops!
Personally liked the different insult, it shows she is familiar with Dirt insults, but not completely that she can’t make a mistake, or she simply put her own spin on it (like Arnie did in Terminator 2)
Probably “Neural” transmitters, as they transmit the neural impulses to a recording device.
I like how concretia helped save concretia.
It was a concrete problem that need it a concrete solution.
I’m annoyed that someone commented this before I did
Tuff luck.
Solid response. Glad it wasn’t taken for Granite. I know, REALLY old puns here. I’ll try not to Rock the boat any further.
Now now, play gneiss.
Marbleous puns!
Thank you. Glad to see people aren’t Jaded to a good old fashioned Pun War.
Bring it on!
It’s not a real geologic war of words until someone resorts to basalt and flat-earthery.
At which point the schist really hits the (alluvial) fan.
I was planning to lava this thread alone, but it’s too slate now.
I totally agree with that sediment.
That is one very confused store clerk. “Why are you just stealing my hand sanitizer?”
I suspect one look at them, and he knows.
If I were that clerk, I’d have that same expression, but be thinking, “It’s really distressing you’re pointing that gun at me, preventing me from verbally allowing you to just take the hand sanitizer that you clearly need more than we do.”
Well, not those words exactly. i mean, I don’t actually think in words most of the time. But I don’t have a mechanism to communicate my thoughts apart from words, so….
I’d be thinking, why are you looking like the dressmakers, that do alterations on Lady GaGa’s costumes.
I believe the exact words in my case would be “You know, if you’d just *asked* I might have just let you take it, but noooo, customers always have to do things the hard way.”
He’s probably wondering if the guy’s going to steal a bathtub next.
Clerk: “Why are you just stealing my hand sanitizer?”
*points*
Clerk: “The paper towels are on isle 2.”
Not the brightest henchmen in the world either – just involved in a crime, publicly commits another crime moments later. Dude, just use the company credit card, nobody is going to question it.
You know, once you use your henchhood to wipe off all the obvious gibs first.
Have you ever seen the movie Bank Shot starring Walter Matthau? The final scene:
“Are we sure it was him who robbed the bank?” “The tellers all agreed he was soaking wet.”
(He ended up in a stolen vehicle that went into the ocean.)
Why they are stealing? They are obviously people with means, certainly enough to be able to put down some 20$ for some hand sanitizers, rather that risk to attract even more attention to them with a robbery.
Also, this is still set in 2011. Hand sanitizer was available, but it was not as big a deal as it has been for the last year.
More a stink-face than stink-eye in that last panel. Cora and Dabbler both know how to push Max’s buttons.
Also, should it be neuro-transmitters in panel 4 instead of nero?
Nero transmitter is the brand name
Enjoy your No-Prize
Nero transmitters™ sounds like either madness inducing or indenciary ammo.
It’s a transmitter keyed to only work for sounds made by a fiddle.
There’s actually nothing too extra-legal that’s gone on. That ‘footage is actually just fine because it’s kind of the equivalent of getting footage from a public camera.
I think.
Think again. Public cameras are visible, and you don’t have any real expectation of privacy near any of them.
This ‘tap’ follow them specifically, and probably also records a lot of information that cameras can’t pick up. If you combine the heartrate of one with what he just happens to say, it could work as a lie detector.
No it isn’t. Even if she isn’t officially deputized, she’s acting as an agent of the State, so all applicable warrant and evidentiary laws apply to her as an extension. That means any information she’s obtained illegally can’t be introduced in court.
Hasn’t the old “anonymous tip” been a long standing means by which police circumvent such legal concerns?
“anonymous tip” has probably been stretched to near the breaking point with all the police raids over the years going on bad tips or to wrong addresses.
That having been said, the evidence they gain from these neuro-taps would never have been admissible in court *anyway*, due to the unfamiliar technology, but it could be utilized to figure out how to get the evidence in a way that would be admissible in court. I mean, it’s not like these thugs are going to suddenly be model citizens, and if we know everywhere they go and everything they do, it’ll be easy to “find” them somewhere else doing nefarious deeds and “track” them back from there “using” legally approved means.
It is, however, a fairly frustrating process that cops tend to not want to bother with.
Heh, someone has watched the latest show of Last Week Tonight.
They can always say that Dabbler found them using magic or psychic abilities to locate them and figure out what they were doing. Police have a long tradition of hiring psychics to help on cases, so there is precedent.
> That having been said, the evidence they gain from these neuro-taps would never have been admissible in court *anyway*, due to the unfamiliar technology, but it could be utilized to figure out how to get the evidence in a way that would be admissible in court.
If they obtain the evidence based on information that was obtained illegal then all of it is “Fruit of the poisonous tree” and not admissible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
As I understand it, they would not be able to use the results of the taps in court as they were not properly warranted. They would however, be able to use them at the ‘probable cause’ level of evidence when applying for a warrant, and anything subsequently found under that warrant would not be tainted by the means through which the warrant was obtained. In effect, the tap feeds would be treated in a similar way to an overheard conversation or unofficially-obtained amateur recordings.
Of course, I may be wrong, and/or there may be significant differences between jurisdictions.
Archon could easily put out an APB to local law enforcement asking to be notified of any reports of people covered in blood and ‘officially’ wait for the store manager to come running in with the footage. They could then take that and hope to find them in an FBI database with facial recognition and track down their current addresses, all the while still keeping tabs on the perps until they close on them through legal-defensible channels.
While the recordings will be inadmissible due to not being considered a proven technology, there is no reason to assume that there is anything legally poison about it. So, they might not be able to get a warrant based on the direct recordings, but they can recognize where the henches are, and then Sydney can fly there and say, “That’s them!” and the arrest will stand.
If a random citizen breaks into a house and then turns information found there over to the police, the evidence is not poison. As soon as the police get a warrant in good faith based on information that they truthfully disclose the provenance of, the evidence they collect from that warrant is generally admissible.
Nope. The state did not ask Cora to do a dang thing (other than watch some prisoners, which role she abandoned to go save Sydney.)
She was not an agent of Arc at the time she decided to do what she did, and Cora explicitly was not following Arc’s directives to her about what she could and could not do.
This is not even tough.
It doesn’t matter if they asked her or not. She’s working on their behalf she has to follow their rules.
If she’s a civilian, she’s not allowed to invade other’s privacy at all. This doesn’t really help.
Cora’s used to being the head woman around. Maxima, clearly the head woman around there and not someone Cora can really deal with one on one. She’s pushing her buttons to test boundaries and see just what she can and can’t get away with.
I also feel that there is some definite attraction thrown into the mix as well.
Yes, Cora is pushing Max to get her off her high horse. I think Max is over reacting because she got handed her panties by Hench Woman and that doesn’t sit well with Max ‘s self-image.
Max is too used to being the undisputed Queen of the mountain and has become a bit too arrogant for her own good. Cora is not being cowed and is all too capable of taking Max down a peg or two. Max still has not even acknowledged that Cora not only saved Sydney’s life but perhaps the entire planet from a potential huge disaster if that scum bag had managed to capture and use Sydney’s globes.
While Cora’s tapping of the two sidekicks is arguably illegal, Cora is not a police officer. Let’s see how principled Max is and whether she accepts any intel gathered from the taps.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Max to show some gratitude for saving Sydney and capturing a boatload of crooks.
We still on this “She’s just jealous!” train?
Saving Sydney is taken for granted and expected. In fact, killing in the extreme defense of herself or another is the only way Cora could have gotten away with using lethal force at all.
If it were under any other circumstance, the comments would be discussing whether or not Max has the right to detain Cora.
As of right now, with Max merely grilling her for using a gratuitous amount of lethal force/ordinance, this is about as well as Cora could have hoped it would go.
Except it may be legal under exigent circumstances.
Consider that Cora just came from observing a very destructive super-brawl. And said super-brawl was used to prevent a LEO from reclaiming a piece of alien tech that was used against a Government agent. And all the info relayed to Cora via Sydney’s glasses.
Circumstances would show a large conspiracy, on top of assault and attempted murder of multiple LEOs… so under the EC doctrine, it could be argued that it was necessary to do so without a warrant to prevent a worse event.
Isn’t Cora technically a civilian? And cannot law enforcement use information gained from a civilian “bug” as long as said bug was not planted at the behest of said law enforcement? Or something like that?
[shrug] I don’t know – my legal knowledge of such things comes from TV, so no doubt I’m missing some nuance.
Yes, IIRC it does work that way.
Though the civilian might be legally liable for obtaining it, if they broke any laws in doing so.
In these circumstances I’d call her and officer of the court of a different jurisdiction.With a bit of work it’d be easy to say it was planted at the behest.
You can compare this footage to a tip. Not admissable in court, but sufficient grounds for a warrant.
Not sure there could be an expectation of privacy in these circumstances.
No. She’s acting as an agent of the State, so anything that applies to them applies to her. The Fourth and Sixth Amendments are a lot broader than you think.
While Cora is technically a civilian, she would absolutely be considered a state actor in these circumstances. She is acting in concert with and at the behest of a governmental organization.
That told her not to do what she did, and did not know what she was going to do or even that she could or had done it. She’s as much a state actor as she is a centaur.
Yes, this is why prosecutors can always say ‘But the police officer was under orders not to illegally collect evidence, therefore they were not acting as a police officer when illegally collecting evidence, therefore we can use the evidence.’ Any judge would happily accept that argument.
ArcSWAT brought her along from ARCHON HQ. She’s on the planet at all at the invitation of ARCHON. She has a history of working for and alongside ArcSWAT. At the start of the fight, Dabbler specifically gave her orders for how to participate in the fight (how closely Cora followed those orders is irrelevant). Sydney called her to another location to effect a rescue. No judge in the country is going to look at those facts and determine her actions aren’t the government’s responsibility.
What ‘history of working for and alongside ArcSWAT’?
When she retrieved Sydney, she was not doing that for ArcSWAT (or even Archon), she was doing that for Dabbles
And that’s the closest she has ever come to having worked for or alongside Archon
“[Cora] is as much a state actor as she is a centaur.” – Dal
All of the hard-light forms in which we’ve seen her so far have been four-limbed, but that doesn’t necessarily prove her incapable of manifesting a six-limbed form…
When sworn law enforcement and helpful civilians interact, things can get strange. Mas Ayoob once told a story of a police officer who received some aid from an armed civilian after being attacked by two bad guys, one of whom fled the scene. The officer wanted to chase the one who ran so he pointed at the remaining one and told the civilian ‘I’m gonna go after the runner; you take care of him’. The civilian said “Okay,” and shot the perp. “He’s taken care of, boss. What’s next?”
What we have here is a failure to communication.
Or, you know, perhaps perfect success. Life is funny like that.
And… now the civilian will be charged with murder, intentional and premeditated murder
Cora is technically an illegal alien. With “alien” serving double duty. She is not a citizen of the United States, and does not bear a passport allowing her entry.
As to the recording, I think the answer is “it depends.” There are states which allow single party recording (one person knowing the recording is going on is all that it takes to make it legal), and states where everyone must be aware that the recording is taking place. And then how that interacts with law enforcement is yet another issue. State laws can vary widely and wildly, and I have no idea what they are in NY state. And NY city may have its own laws as well, which may or may not be subordinate to the state laws. And then there are federal laws…
Go ask a fake Internet lawyer, I’m sure they will know all and can tell you exactly how this all works.
Aww. Bye bye captain kittycat suit.
We’re all mourning.
*toasts*
“Devastated Meats” is THE hot new Pop-Metal band.
Their covers ares are brutal.
Dickback? Never heard that before.
It’s like Nickleback but they are more honest with themselves.
Stealing your idea. I have story where they are trying to make a moral and just society of goblins. Not Harry Potter goblins. Angry 2 year olds equal adults goblins. And they managed to grow to a ripe age of 2 by cannibalism in large part. So at least save a life or two before you get a pass on killing SquintyEyez for looking at you funny.
Perhaps a “two for one” deal? You have to save two lives for every one you take, but no “credit building loops” (so maybe a rule of “lives saved only count if you’re saving them from health crises or natural disaster, not murder.” So you can’t have 3 people going around “saving” each other FROM each other and building up stupid credit that way.)
Or perhaps a “token” matter? A person only has one life token at a time (one a year, or one a lifetime if you wanna play hardcore mode) so you only get “credit” for saving that person’s life if they give you the token (and the token maybe goes away if they die? Provides incentive to keep token rescues alive, that’s for sure…)
It’s totally crazy and weird but it does indeed sound like a very Star Trek sort of social premise. (I mean, if you can get sentenced to death for breaking a window on accident, this is NOTHING!)
If so then trying to kill someome or yourself should result in a redacted life credit. So its either transfered or totaly lost so building credit cant be done in a small group without fraud and a victim.
It seems like Maxima is nearing her limit of how much cheek she can deal with. Also I was not expecting Cora to have done that well played.
Maybe not Star Trek or Doctor Who, but The Orville might tackle something like that.
If you want to go even farther into how the “codified karma” system would completely fail, let’s take Dr. Serial Killer, MD:
He’s a serial killer, and has victims, who have families, who hate that he’s impervious to legal justice. Somebody somewhere who’s not a serial killer but has enough good karma for one murder is going to kill the dude, and then the judge needs to decide whether that’s MORE good karma for killing somebody who was doing evil, or extra bad karma because Dr. Murderer was staying ahead on net good karma, and it’s ridiculous and makes no sense.
Basically the whole society would devlove into some sort of vigilante justice free-for-all, with decent plus-karma people stealing from, beating up, or straight-up murdering the evil plus-karma people who abuse the system.
Which now that I think of it is kind of how most classic superhero settings work.
Actually, the system could work, though it would get insanely complicated. Then again, our current system’s already insanely complicated, so…
The check-and-balance to your ‘Dr Serial Killer’ example would be the Doc’s family and friends; the LAW might let you off for killing him, but they might disagree, and use their ‘credits’ to off you. So you’d have to be damned sure any ‘legal’ murder would be worth the risk of retaliation. That would probably weigh against having too many allowable murders happen.
The system might also weigh on the side of a victim getting revenge; suppose you have a doctor who is also a rapist (since if you can use ‘credits’ to offset a murder, why not other crimes?) Doc Evil rapes a patient, and she comes back with a gun and kills him. The system might weigh the harm done to her, and lighten the ‘credit debt’ for the murder. Kind of a delayed self-defense ruling.
I would also wonder if one could use their ‘credits’ for lesser benefits. Want a new car? You can either pay with money, like normal, or save up enough ‘credits’ to offset the auto-theft charge. Want a raise at work? Save up enough ‘credits’ to ‘earn’ it. Student loan debt too much? Use your ‘credits’ to make them go away. I’d imagine that the system would require a fairly high ‘credit’ balance to offset a murder, but there would be a LOT of lesser things to spend one’s ‘credits’ on, and most people would settle for smaller, more immediate uses than saving up for a legal killing, unless they really, really, really wanted that person dead. So there would be another check on legalized murder; most folks wouldn’t hate anyone enough to spend the effort of amassing that many ‘credits’.
Now, if they could pool their ‘credits’, letting a group of people each ‘donate’ some to the one who will do the actual murder, that might change things… but probably not too much.
Reminds me of the death spell in Bujold’s House of Chalion: It was absurdly easy to pull off. It only had two catches.
1) It only worked if the Bastard god was agreeable; Attempting it unsuccessfully was considered attempted murder, success was theologically considered a miracle of divine justice. And, of course, impossible to punish, because,
2) It was a murder/suicide spell. You had to be genuinely willing to die, too.
minor Addendum: The Bastard being agreeable generally assumes the killing is “justified” – according to one priest of the Bastard, who examines Death Magic attempts, there has never been a successful target of a Death Miracle that hadn’t deserved to die in some sense. The two we get first hand involve a father avenging his son’s death at the hands of a professional duelist (which was covered up for a bribe by the local judge), and Lord Cazaril, trying to save his charge, [princess] Iselle, from marrying…the scum of the earth, basically. Listing all of that guy’s failures and faults would take…A LONG while.
The “prayer” we’ve seen for it is very telling: “Lord Bastard, god of justice when justice fails, of balance, of all things out of season, of my need. For dy Sanda [murdered when he wouldn’t take a bribe]. For Iselle. For all who love her – Lady Betriz, Royina Ista, the old Provincara. For the mess on my back [Caz was sold to a slave galley due to the afore mentioned scumbag]. For truth against lies. Receive my prayer…
Help me, help me, help me.“
Well, there are 2 ideas to put in – first, deliberate versus non-deliberate crimes. You could declare “deliberate crimes” off the table entirely. So, you’re good deeds can save from “oops, I killed someone accidentally” but not from “yes your honor, I tracked him to his house and blew his brains out.” You’d run the trial in a similar fashion to a self-defense defense – admission of guilt mitigated by [x] – but you’re main issue is proving it was an accident, and that you’ve got enough moral credit that you ought to be forgiven. Of course, if there are lesser crimes also associated with your offense (you accidentally killed someone, but you most certainly deliberately (for the sake of the legal definition) drove while intoxicated), all those charges would apply as normal.
You kind of touched on it, but the other major point is “valuation” – Saving someone’s life in a non-clinical setting might be valued at…10,000 “credits” let’s say…but straight up murder is 1,000,000 Credits – Sure, a someone doing Doctors without Boarders might earn one pull of a trigger in a year, but it’s not enough to go on a spree unless they saved it up for their entire working life-time (And what kind of killing spree do you wait your whole life to go on? Half the people you want dead probably die of natural causes first).
Now, you might get a much better offset for something like manslaughter – ie, someone died because of your actions, it was foreseeable, but you did not mean for anyone to die – might only have a credit value of 20,000. It’s not a one-to-one trade, but it does offset a lot. Someone who engages in a lot of personal charity work might earn a single “oops” every couple of decades, which is a fairly good bit of insurance for those who think about the future, and nicely encourages personal and direct social philanthropy. Being able to pay off other things with your moral credits is also a good idea – I could see someone working 4 hours in a soup kitchen, volunteer, every week of the year, to pay for their own health insurance, for example – keeping people fed, and thus healthier, probably produces enough savings to the local health infrastructure to offset the costs of your own potential injuries – remember, most insurance rarely pays out regularly – 1 person’s bills get supported by 30+ people who didn’t have any health issues that year. So you don’t have to offset “much” on a personal basis. You’d need to crunch a lot of numbers to figure out the proper worth of a credit, and how to pass the infrastructure savings to the insurer (or whoever) on the back-end, but it ought to be feasible.
*I’m not handing a doctor in a clinical situations NEARLY as much “credit” as someone outside of it – firstly, the former is going to get paid for thier work (probably, and if not, wtf are they doing working there?!), and they are doing both a duty and a job. They would still get some “credit” – but not to the same extent as someone solving an emergency “in-situ.” Secondly, someone preforming a mammogram is technically saving someone’s life, in the long term, but it’s very much not the same thing as the ER surgeon pulling a bullet out a lung – and they ought to be “awarded” different values.
Reminds me of those legends where someone has to do a certain amount of good deeds or save a hundred souls to get into heaven.
Right now, the only story that’s coming to mind is Pirates of the Caribbean but I know there are older ones.
The footage might not be admissible as proof,
But if maxima shows on scene to catch them – wouldn’t that count as caught in the act ? :)
She won’t fly in to arrest them during the armed robberies.
Right now, it’s the equivalent of having a vehicle tracker show the cops they went to store X, and then having video in store X showing them robbing the store.
The sticky legal part comes when they go back to their handlers and start talking.
Now, the location of their handlers would fall under the ‘tracking device’ legality. Any recordings of their discussions, though … one of those fun areas that make folks tear their hair out. It COULD fall under ‘exigent circumstances’.
Whoa Max. You squeeze any harder and that shirt’s gonna blow!
…because working plots haven’t stopped Star Trek so far.
Good news for Cora is that these fellows were actively engaged in committing a crime, directly related to a terroristic event in NYC that was triggered by their criminal organization and that the tracking was planted then. It is the same as a bank clerk giving a robber a briefcase with a tracking chip in it or exploding dye (or in the case of their boss, explode and die.)
Yes I believe there is precedent. Cops can stick a tracker on a stolen car and not chase it to minimize collateral damage. They have put cameras in “bait” cars or transmitters in money wrappers and bags. They hacked laptops and phones to see and hear and I heard of a case where they hacked a game console to see inside a house.
So, looks like in contrast to last time, Cora actually did get to save Sydney’s life. The previous time being when Sydney was left stranded on a different planet and activated her warp drive after gaining 3 points for her orbs. All in all, it’s really good to have her.
Yeah, I tend to think she would have gotten home from Fracture station on her own eventually, but not so pleasantly.
Who knows, without Cora there, she might have run in to Deus.
There is such a thing as Community Service [Community Restitution], though a judge isn’t likely to sentence someone to that for serious offenses like murder.
Even in prison, someone imprisoned is likely to get a reduced sentence for good behavior. At least in the US.
It’s not as all-encompassing as what DaveB is talking about, but I think it comes close.
There are also certain “no-fault” clauses – for example, if someone stops breathing, and you are the only person around, so you have to perform CPR, you aren’t held responsible for their death if you screw it up, or if there are complications that result from your use of CPR.
OK Cora is cool. Sydney can keep her.
If I were Cora’s lawyer, I’d probably be fishing for jury nullification. Or leaning on the “self defense” argument (it’s generally accepted that proportionate force is allowed in order to defend yourself or another from imminent harm)
I agree that the “net positive” system falls apart if it’s pushed to the level of get-out-of-jail-free cards, but it can work if it’s only at the level of cutting people more slack if they’re generally good people, and only coming down at full force on those who are already monsters, or who blatantly set out to game the system.
It wouldn’t get that far. No DA is going to attempt to try Cora for killing a guy who was in the process of trying to kill Sydney.
A certain sort of DA might, to establish precedent that an alien that breaks “Earth law” is still subject to the local legal system, win or lose.
In I think it was Farnham’s Freehold by Heinlein they visit a alternate Earth where all justice is a 1 to 1 basis. And they refer to the day they killed all the lawyers. Not sure how that would work in cases like corporation crimes or systematic injustice but I gather it was more of a poke at the legal system by the author than a well thought out idea.
l
Actually “The number of the beast” I think. At least that’s what it was called in UK.
You may be thinking of Heinlein’s The Number Of The Beast. In that story the group visits an alternate universe where the old maxim “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is applied quite literally. The group observes the punishment for the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident. The guilty person is taken back to the same location the crime was committed, they are run over by the same type of vehicle, then they had to lay there and suffer for the same amount of time as the original victim before medical assistance arrives.
I always found Heinlein’s explanation for what the number of the beast represented intriguing. It wasn’t Satan, but the number of parallel universes, being 6 raised to the 6th power raised to the 6th power.
Yup, and that book is why no longer enjoy reading books: things we ‘read’ are actually happening to those people in a different universe (same with movies)
There was an episode of The Orville (I think it was “Majority Rule”), where they visited a planet where trials were performed by social media “likes”.
There was also this little gem of a (very) short story from a few years back.
Great little story with some timely social commentary, thanks for sharing
#nice
Balancing good dids outweigh bad dids is exactly jury nullification. In da clear
No, it’s really really not. It’s first about redressing bad laws. Juries in the North used it regularly against the Fugitive Slave Act. Secondarily, it is about circumstances that the law does not contemplate. The classic example is stealing a water hose to put out a fire. The DA is supposed to not bring the case in the first place, and the Grand Jury is supposed to refuse to indict, but if you are the ham sandwich, the Petite Jury retains the right to refuse to convict.
They’d almost certainly have to write new laws regarding privacy to cover hacking someone’s nervous system to spy on what they’re doing and saying. They’re almost constantly having to update old laws because new technology isn’t covered by them. Consider paternity: DNA evidence that you’re not the father of a child doesn’t actually qualify as legal proof you were cuckolded in some places to get out of paying child support as the laws only allowed for not much other than ‘I was there and saw that he did not have sex with that woman around the time of conception,’ even though you’d think the DNA test would be absolute proof of having witnessed the guy not father the child. The idea you could prove through science with absolute certainty that someone didn’t father a child never occurred to lawmakers (excluding edge cases like how you can’t prove with DNA that an identical twin was really the father unless they were a chimera).
It’s also not very bright pushing Maxima like that. Cora’s gotten too used to that (as we saw in the introduction to her) and really not thinking things through pushing someone she knows just needs to point her finger and can one-shot not just her ship but a massive assault ship from a hostile alien species that normally requires an army to take down.
The rationale is that society has a need for certainty in parentage, for the benefit of the child, more than the man has a right to only support children of his blood.
Personally, though, I think it is criminal fraud by the woman against the man, so even if he has to continue the child support, he should be able to get an un-bankruptable judgement against her for the amount she has defrauded him of.
Which still has it that the man shouldn’t be supporting children that aren’t his in place of the man who did father them. This admittedly does run afoul of other problems as some states are ridiculously aggressive about trying to burn men to the point of trying to go after sperm bank donors when the women moves to their state and trying to force them to pay up years or even decades of child support for a child they shouldn’t be paying for.
Ugh, didn’t get the rest of the post in right. I agree that when the woman does that kind of thing she should be held accountable for fraud. She knew she was with more than one man and randomly going ‘I choose you!’ like tossing around a pokeball to stick a guy with the bill or worse going ‘well that’s the guy with the best income I’ll pick him so I can live well off the child support.’ Such criminal activity should require restitution if not jail time as well given the amount that will be defrauded from a guy for a child that’s not his reaches felony fraud levels.
A life can only be taken once, barring resurrection shenanigans, but it can be saved many times.
Nobody has ever saved a life. All they’ve ever done is delay a death.
Too many people die in their early twenties but are not buried until their eighties.
I really wish I didn’t have to wait that long. *eats another fast food burger and smokes a pack of Marlboros*
I’m beginning to think Cora doesn’t have much of a self-preservation instinct. ( I know, you literally say in the comments below the comic that this is only happening because you think it amusing, but.)
I mean, Cora doesn’t know Maxima nearly well enough to be absolutely certain that Max wouldn’t backhand her, but she does know Maxima well enough to know a single thoughtless backhand could kill or permanently maim her or leave her comatose and or brain damaged. She’s sort of talking a lot of smack for someone in fireball range, if you get my D&D drift.
I’d think anyone with a well developed sense of self-preservation would treat someone like Maxima with very kid gloves, and probably make a point of standing out of reach. Useless that may be, but it’s a subconscious thing, you don’t get in reach of a dangerous creature. She’s sort of acting like Dabbler, who does know Max well enough to act like this. Maybe Cora is unconsciously trusting Dabbler’s behavior?
Superman only gets a pass on this in his setting because he’s such a known boy scout / goody two-shoes, he wouldn’t harm anyone except in the defense of others, not even himself typically. The only real concern standing near him might be if something unknown influences his actions. Considering his power, a paranoid person might never, ever want to get very near Superman based on that.
Considering Max is currently arguing against casual murder, I can see Cora being pretty confident in her sass.
I think Cora realizes that Max has plenty of awareness of what she’s capable of doing and more than enough self-control to avoid flying off the handle and seriously injuring someone for tweaking her.
I’d guess that Cora has a force field protecting her, and is overly trusting of it. Said force field is not nearly as strong as Sydney’s shield orb and could not stand up to Max. But it does allow Cora to feel less intimidated by Max so long as she doesn’t realize it’d crumple like so much tissue paper if Max actually tried to hurt Cora.
That false sense of confidence will probably last for a good while, as Max isn’t going to attack Cora so long as Cora is roughly allied with Archon. Cora certainly has seen evidence that Max could basically ignore her shield, but she hasn’t done the math to realize it yet, and probably won’t unless forced to somehow.
Been a few days in-universe, Dabbler is Cora’s friend and on the team, and they’ve had time to talk. So she may figure she can get away with a little bit of stuff if Dabbler is being tolerated on the team.
Reminds me of that Arnold Schwarzenegger film “True Lies,” where the new guy on the team tries sassing the big boss of the agency after seeing Ah-nold do it.
The response, “what makes you think I will give you the same leeway I give him?”
that is a very good point, you have to build a repour with someone first, mutual understanding of boundaries, seeds of friendship or at least whatever the next closest thing is *I don’t think English has a word between acquaintance and friend to define this properly*,
earn that trust and tolerance, like the bastard with a heart of gold, the boss puts up with his attitude because at the end of the day he will have your back, and rescue those orphans on the school bus while getting the job done. You know just how far they will go, and what they will do.
Dabbler has become a known quantity, Cora is still an unknown quantity to Maxima. She helped Sydney for Dabbler, but beyond a mutual survival counter to the Fel, this makes only the second combat situation Maxima has seen her in.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make. Cora hasn’t earned Max’s trust, and more importantly, I’d think Cora would / should KNOW that Max is quite literally the most dangerous beast around in several star systems. Maybe even more.
Max can probably 1v1 those giant things Sydney was blasting.
That system did exist and it worked pretty well for the most part. It was called medievalism (not strictly feudalism though it was that too).
There is a law that says that proving that not breaking the law the way you did would cause even worse things to happen than said lawbreaking means the laws you broke weren’t enough to cover the situation and therefore what you did wasn’t illegal. Testing possibly lethal cancer cures on non-terminal patients isn’t enough to charge a doctor with murder, though they may well lose their medical license.
Who cares whether the footage is admissable? “How did you know where they were?” I’m a really good guesser. It’s like a superpower! And now that we’re here, just look at all this interesting stuff!
ArcDark did a thing and so we know. It’s the sort of reason we employ them.
The real question is, after those guys are arrested, who is going to remove the bugs on their nervous systems?
I can’t imagine it’d be healthy or safe to just let the tech deteriorate inside them.
There’s an app for that.
Normally I’d have expected Sydney to have asked Dabbler if she has a cleaning spell handy by now. I guess Sydney hasn’t thought about this is due to the PTSD she’s currently dealing with.
That and the ‘side effects’… she’s had a cleaning spell from Dabbler before.
Actually that was a warmth spell.
I’m pretty sure “Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Maxima” has been used already…
To be equally fair, it bears repeating XD
Looks like Sydney is beginning to recover
Yep a little of her “normal self” is poking it’s head out to see if it’s safe to emerge.
Actually still a typo,
it NEO
Made by The Matrix corporation and Cora can even blue pill them any time she want since she’s in their nervous system.
“I also, however, managed to implant nero-transmitters in the two henchmen…”
Did you mean neuro?
In the U.S., if you are working for the government you need a warrant otherwise your evidence is considered tainted. If you are not working for the government any evidence you gather is admissible, even if it is gathered illegally.
Exigent Circumstance exemption exists for a reason…
I will explain why the exigent circumstances exception does not apply here at all when I get home. Cant write all that out on my phone.
Ok I’m home and done with work so I can explain this now.
Exigent circumstances means there was an emergency situation which required swift action to prevent imminent danger to life or serious damage to property, or to prevent the imminent escape of a suspect or destruction of evidence.
For example, a police officer hears screaming and sounds of hitting coming from an apartment. He or she is not needing to then wait for a warrant in order to enter the apartment – they can just break down the door because there are ‘exigent circumstances.’
None of the definition of exigent circumstances applies to requiring a warrant to put what are essentially listening devices (“bugs”) on the two henchmen in the presented scenario in the comic. Even though it’s high tech using their own nervous system, it’s still a bug. It would require a judge to sign off on it first. The use of the technology is the same as what would happen if you hit them with a little device which just stuck TO them instead of went IN them. There were no exigent circumstances which would require doing that to them without getting a warrant first. Especially since Cora was able to capture them instead.
Usually, evidence gained by private citizens are admissible in court, even if that evidence was obtained illegally. But I’m saying Cora would need to follow these laws based on the argument that she’s basically acting as an agent of Archon, even though she doesnt work directly FOR Archon. She basically has been acting as a state actor there. There’s precedent on that as well, usually involving when a private detective does something illegal in order to get evidence, then gives it to the police. (People v McComb (1965) being the most notable precedent).
Oops, I missed this comment before writing the one below. So essentially, a state actor is one who does collection of evidence for a specific case, while mass collectors like Google who then sell all their information to the government, those are okay. Same with PRISM. Basically it’s okay so long as you wiretap people who aren’t criminals. That logic is pretty hard to follow but I can see it exists in practice.
“So essentially, a state actor is one who does collection of evidence for a specific case, while mass collectors like Google who then sell all their information to the government, those are okay.”
Correct. Also, at least as far as most judges have been concerned, percedent-wise, if the actor is doing something which could ONLY benefit the state, then there’s a presumption that the actor was doing so as an extension of the state to get around the state needing a warrant. Whease mass collectors like Google or Apple and facebook, etc, are collecting the data and metadata for reasons that usually have nothing to do with the state’s investigations.
In any case, while the actual recordings would be inadmissable in court, they can be used as probable cause to obtain a warrant to arrest those involved. Further evidence would be required to obtain a conviction.
No it cant be used as probable cause either. Any arrest or evidence obtained as a result of this would be considered “fruit of the poisonous tree.” If you cant use the fruit from the poisonous tree, you also cannot use the poisonous tree itself in court either.
What they could say, however, about any evidence or arrest they get would have been found by “inevitable discovery” by other legal means instead. Doesnt -always- work, but often does.
I am curious why this would be considered fruit of the poisonous tree. How is this different from tossing a hidden camera that sticks to their coat like the bond movies? Is there some law that says you cannot compromise a criminal’s privacy *while* they’ve been caught in the act of committing another crime? I know you can’t get cameras without a warrant, but does that still apply if the criminals escape with cameras added during the chase? Cameras are often used during sting operarions such as carjacking where the criminal isn’t known ahead of time. On the other hand you’re allowed to shoot violent suspects so… Isn’t this like shooting them with a camera rather than a bullet? Is the camera treated differently because it’s conceptually able to uncover other crimes? Is that because it’s important to disallow catching illegal actions from politicians a la two-party wiretapping states?
Sorry, I just realized I don’t know know the boundaries of surveillance laws very well. I mean, PRISM and NSA, so YMMV I guess…
It’s considered fruit of the poisonous tree because the means by which Cora would get the evidence, if a judge was to consider her a state actor (which is very likely, considering she was doing SOMETHING at Arc-Swat’s request – guarding prisoners), was illegally obtained without a warrant.
The illegality by which Cora bugged them is the poisonous tree. Any evidence that comes FROM that illegal, warrantless act by a state actor is considered ‘fruit’ of the poisonous tree.
I mentioned also why this would not be excused by ‘exigent circumstances’ in another post.
“How is this different from tossing a hidden camera that sticks to their coat like the bond movies?”
It’s not. That’s sort of the point. You can’t do that either without it being signed off by a judge, at least not in the fact pattern that happened here (no exigent circumstances existed, the danger was already over, the criminals were already foiled and Cora just LET them get away because she had already bugged them).
Also James Bond is from the UK, not the US, and is a spy for MI6, not a law enforcement officer dealing with civilians. Different fact pattern would exist with Bond. Mainly because he’s not trying to get an arrest. He has a license to kill :)
“Is there some law that says you cannot compromise a criminal’s privacy *while* they’ve been caught in the act of committing another crime?”
Yes. The 4th Amendment. :)
“I know you can’t get cameras without a warrant, but does that still apply if the criminals escape with cameras added during the chase?”
It does if you are LETTING them escape, like Cora did.
“Cameras are often used during sting operations such as carjacking where the criminal isn’t known ahead of time. ”
Different fact pattern there.
1) Judges DO usually sign off in advance on sting operations.
2) You are not invading a suspect’s privacy or doing a search when they break into a trap car. They have no expectation of privacy of not being videotaped while they are in the trap car. There’s precedent for this as well. There have been cases in which police were able to use statements used by suspects who were already in a police car and left alone together, because they had no expectation of privacy that the car would NOT be bugged. Same way you don’t have an expectation of privacy when a police officer with a bodycam pulls you over against being videotaped in that situation. Again, different than the above fact pattern in the comic.
“On the other hand you’re allowed to shoot violent suspects so… Isn’t this like shooting them with a camera rather than a bullet?”
There are a few reason this is different as well.
1) The other two were not about to kill Sydney. In fact, one of them was trying to prevent the other from shooting Sydney.
2) Even if one of them was still a threat to Sydney, Cora can shoot them. But that still doesnt mean she can videotape them after they’re no longer there with an illegal bug. At least not where you can then use the information in a court. Although like I’ve mentioned before, prosecutors would be likely to argue ‘inevitable discovery’ which…. would probably work with some judges. Depends on the judge really.
“Is that because it’s important to disallow catching illegal actions from politicians a la two-party wiretapping states?”
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking here, but I’m going to try to answer it by saying that the 4th amendment protections in GENERAL includes wiretapping without a warrant. There’s a rather famous case called Katz v United States (1967) which expanded the Fourth Amendment protection against ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ to cover electronic wiretaps.
“Sorry, I just realized I don’t know know the boundaries of surveillance laws very well.”
Not a problem. :)
Katz v United States is probably the best case law to read up on (there are a LOT of synopses on this case, often written in layman form since it’s one of the earlier cases you learn in the first year of Crim law in law school) if you want to learn more about surveillance laws when it comes to electronic wiretaps.
My last question was a bit loaded but intentionally. Basically, a successful government operates based on certain principles but routinely violates those principles to a limited extent in order to achieve secondary goals. If any government was 100% transparent by following its legally stipulated principles to a tee it would fall to its enemies within weeks. I was asking if the modern purpose of preventing ad hoc surveillance was not to enable privacy (because of public and private cameras it rarely does, and people usually hand those over without a warrant) but rather to serve as a legal clincher for DAs seeking to protect a political figure from scrutiny.
If the criminal gets away because they intend to trace that criminal it’s understandable that that is not legally feasible. Then again perhaps because intent is not always clearly definable that is why all non-warranted tracing would be illegal.
This is a really tough one because it touches on the privacy issue. While you bring up a good point about the 4th, the 4th’s privacy requirement was “interpreted into law” by SCOTUS, which is why it didn’t register when I thought about it. I’ll read Katz first but it looks like I’m going to need to read a lot more to figure out what’s really going on. Thanks for the suggestion.
I’ve read the Katz SCOTUS docket along with a few others and I have to say I’m impressed. While I still don’t understand enough about the reasoning behind interpreting the fourth as conferring privacy or why, I can say I understand the rationale for ruling thusly in that particular case.
And I disagree. Not necessarily because the law itself can’t be construed that way; technically you could say the material thing being searched and seized are the sound waves formed by the speaker. Via physics we know this effect isn’t somehow immaterial. Even if it does propagate amongst atoms, the origin of that propagation comes from the speaker, who must exert energy to form those waves. Simply stating that the transience of the effect somehow makes it immaterial would be like saying an undecayed atom of radon is likewise immaterial. It is not.
The problem I have with this interpretation is procedural. The transience of a given conversation is far shorter than the time it would take to get a warrant to overhear said conversation. As pointed out in Katz: it is possible to get a warrant based on an expected conversation, but this requires evidence that a given conversation might occur, and that requires foreknowledge of a crime. This interpretation creates a chicken-and-egg scenario for law enforcement by preventing them from obtaining evidence of many types of collusive crimes until they have already obtained evidence of said crimes. Which I think any rational individual can understand is not a valid exercise of causality.
Moreover, while being “too quick” is not a valid excuse to skirt constitutionality, I think the ramifications of not carving out this exception are far greater. In the 2000s there were a series of SCOTUS cases Citizens United V FEC and McCutcheon V FEC. The broad conclusions were two things: A.) The government cannot needlessly interfere with the people’s election funding and B.) Money is a speech amplifier.
B.) is particularly toxic. There is no constitutional protection for speech amplifiers any more than there is a constitutional protection specifically for megaphones. Additionally, this interpretation has the unfortunate knock-on effect of broadly legalizing cryptocurrency without necessitating any regulation from congress. Cryptomining is a very blatant pyramid scheme and should be treated as such.
Yet this interpretation is necessary in order to allow for the Katz interpretation of the Fourth. See, if the government can neither strictly regulate political finance nor can it broadly detect criminal political intent via wiretaps, then all you’re left with is financial documents and testimony, which are not necessarily reliable. Which means the classic restriction on interactions between fundraisers, candidates, and donors are utterly unenforceable. This necessitates the creation of a new class of donor recipient to handle the funds properly a la PACs.
And this is just the political side of things. While it may seem obvious that privacy is a good and proper right in and of itself, a government cannot operate with such an onerous restriction. The things people do in the privacy of their own home may be their own personal knowledge but the things they choose to communicate may involve government knowledge. Whilst it is important to protect the people against the power of the state (and eavesdropping is a FAR more powerful tool than it was in the 1700s) it is equally important to protect the state’s ability to function without forcing the government to default to rubber-stamp approvals in lieu of actual due process. Once the latter has sufficiently invaded and decayed the mindset of government officials, it will invariably become the predominant method of obtaining approval for any action, as we have seen in recent years from actual warrants and programs like PRISM.
In short, the rubber-stamp approval has already become so common in general governance that the process has looped back around to the judiciary itself. The judicial branch lacking due process is particularly problematic since as one judge in Katz points out;
Therefore, it is obvious that privacy is a right that can and has been enumerated by the constitution. Yet it is also now obvious from following changes to government structure that the existence of this right requires an overbearing corporate presence in public communication since they are not as legally bound as the government.
Regardless of what Section 230 is intended to accomplish, it explicitly names the constitution as a legal text that cannot affect it.
This itself conflicts with the First Amendment which explicitly states
It doesn’t matter whether Section 230 regulates African grapes; Congress cannot unilaterally declare The Constitution ineffectual, especially not against a section which so plainly renders Congress’ own power moot.
But they must, otherwise this restriction would further impede the Executive Branch’s ability to sustain the existence of a coherent Federal body.
A government will continue to exist regardless of what constraints are placed upon it. A ruling body shall always exist for a gathering of like-minded people, so long as those people are unable or unwilling to persist via only personal solidarity. Yet, just like how nonsensical laws are disregarded by people and law enforcement alike, these laws will likewise be disregarded by the government itself, particularly so when said law is utterly unenforceable in practice.
The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” but some of our founders were indeed in favor of libel and blackmail laws. It can be said that these laws enable healthy freedom of speech by preventing harmful speech. Yet, doesn’t the First say “shall make no law”? If the founders themselves were willing to disregard this obvious interpretation of the First, it seems equally obvious that the First would be disregarded by a modern government – as it has.
A common refrain is that the First only applies to government restrictions on free speech. This interpretation is also nonsensical. The First clearly applies to government intervention as a whole. That is, the government cannot make a law that makes certain speech civilly or criminally liable, then give corporations the explicit right to be unmolested by said law, while ALSO giving the latter the explicit right to alter even speech not covered by that exception. Rather than carving out a “common sense” exclusion for procedural matters, this is nothing less than a defacto ban on certain kinds of speech, in the same way the Hughes Amendment creates a defacto ban on automatic weapons. Which is why corporations have changed their terminology from “permanent ban” to “indefinite suspension.” The two are effectively equivalent but the latter has less support in law.
A corporation may now legally alter an individual’s speech, delete evidence of tampering, and then use said falsified language to unilaterally commit libel while still being protected by section 230. This has already happened. I researched the claims made against Stefan Molyneux who supposedly made racist and bigoted remarks. The sad truth? His statements were taken wildly out of context. His most infamous comment about black brains being smaller on average compared to whites and asians is, ironically, scientific and peer-reviewed. In one instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center quoted a statement where Mr. Molyneux very vilely calls middle eastern immigrants “genetically inferior.” I was appalled when I found the original clip. Mr. Molyneus actually said “we should not encourage them to emigrate because otherwise the brightest individuals from that region will not stay behind to fix their own nation’s problems.” Nothing about genetics.
It has become routine to disregard The Constitution in favor of modern interpretations of other sections. Or, in the case of the Copyright Term Extension Act, a post ex facto law, ignore it entirely. While I admit (and have said) that no government can function fully transparently nor can it uphold its virtues without fail, I likewise see the treachery of fully disregarding founding principles in favor of some ulterior goal. No matter what that goal may be it cannot have been as well-considered as a founding principle that has been debated and has likewise succeeded in practice for in excess of 200 years.
While the judicial system may be viewed as properly blind and deaf to biases introduced by subjectivity, the Executive Branch, being an interested party, cannot be held to the same standard. Extant language must be known by a functional government. To the extent that eavesdropping has become a more powerful tool, it should be regulated more strictly, but not so that warrants are hence issued with nonsensical justifications. If entire executive bodies like PRISM are brought into existence fully in defiance of existing law and yet nobody with any actual power is willing or able to question the government’s arrest warrant for the person who uncovered this program, then it is clear to me that existing law is already unenforceable. Privacy simply cannot be a fully-enumerated right.
Whoof. How the fuck do justices do that on a daily basis, and typically with even more rigor…