Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:

saber964 wrote:There is no slam, bam and out the airlock trials. The RMN would hold a trial. The CO would hold a summary court-martshal with the CO serving as judge the ships legal officer as prosacuter and another officer as defense councel.

But the defense attorney must be a putz. Trials are supposed to be fair and impartial. His first motion should be...

A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and its defendant(s) to another community in order to obtain jurors who can be more objective in their duties.

Everyone on the ship can be heard sharpening pitchforks. Everyone reading about the transgression, are thinking pitchforks - at the very least. Well, I am.

JeffEngel wrote:A change to what venue though? Handing them over to local authorities may not be any better: the locals may be the pirates' victims on the one hand, or the government may be in cahoots with them on the other. Or both, for a really complicated situation. Hauling the pirates off somewhere else entirely may take too long. At least a court-martial by the capturing ship's officers means that the alleged pirates aren't being tried by victims or collaborators, and get convicted or exonerated quickly.

For that matter, the capturing ship's officers may be able to sympathize with spacers caught in an ambiguous situation. They themselves may find themselves ordered into such with grievous regularity. Commerce raiding isn't too different from piracy; it's marked off from it by adherence to the laws and customs of war and by being conducted by uniformed personnel under the authority of an established government. But naval officers know that the customs of war can get bent and broken by shady degrees; that their government may well be employing people out of uniform to do some things that they may not (quite?) want to consider straight-up piracy; and that what makes an established government and what constitutes its authority can be a mess too: witness the Havenite Civil War and competing claims to legitimacy. Looking at any accused pirate, a naval officer may easily think, "There but for the grace of favorable shades of gray go I." Or be able to say: "Nope, there's no set of unfortunate bad circumstances to get a good naval officer doing THAT without having gone right off the slippery slope - to the airlock with him."

The sort of legal practice that is consistent with justice will vary with how much legal infrastructure there is in the area. For pirates, it's a matter of crimes committed precisely where governments have only a tenuous ability to bring power to bear. That's part of the elemental nature of the crime - it's a violation of the trust that spacers must put in one another out there in the dark where civilization isn't all around in overwhelming force, but only inside the ship's hull and the minds of crew and officers. If the accused can be brought to trial, it's appropriate for other spacers to serve as their defenders, prosecutors, judges and executioners: they are exactly their peers and those of the victims, and often the only force that can stop them when they need it.

cthia wrote:But the defense attorney must be a putz. Trials are supposed to be fair and impartial. His first motion should be...

A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and its defendant(s) to another community in order to obtain jurors who can be more objective in their duties.

Everyone on the ship can be heard sharpening pitchforks. Everyone reading about the transgression, are thinking pitchforks - at the very least. Well, I am.

SWM" quote="cthia wrote:But the defense attorney must be a putz. Trials are supposed to be fair and impartial. His first motion should be...

A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and its defendant(s) to another community in order to obtain jurors who can be more objective in their duties.

Everyone on the ship can be heard sharpening pitchforks. Everyone reading about the transgression, are thinking pitchforks - at the very least. Well, I am.

saber964 wrote:Hear is a thought. Do you think Treecats will be able to join the SEM military now that they've come out of the closet as far as there intelligence is concerned. They could as an experiment offer positions to those treecats bonded with military personnel eg Alfredo Samantha Nimitz and Hipper. Nimitz and Hipper could be offered Warrants because they have or are currently attended the academy and Alfredo could be offered a NCO rank in line with person.

JeffEngel wrote:

saber964 wrote:Hear is a thought. Do you think Treecats will be able to join the SEM military now that they've come out of the closet as far as there intelligence is concerned. They could as an experiment offer positions to those treecats bonded with military personnel eg Alfredo Samantha Nimitz and Hipper. Nimitz and Hipper could be offered Warrants because they have or are currently attended the academy and Alfredo could be offered a NCO rank in line with person.

Intelligence is one thing, but treecats still think and learn very differently, have attitudes about (e.g.) authority and justice that may fit awkwardly into the same military organization, and do not have the social or technical background that the RMN can assume for its human personnel.

Similarly, I don't think treecats are going to be accepting humans into their clans, not as if they were just another treecat, with all the normal expectations and responsibilities that go with it. Close friends, allies, neighbors, associates - yes, all of these in some cases, and much more as the communication barrier keeps going down and more treecats spend more time with humans. But the same things that make treecats and humans valuable to one another - particularly treecats' empathy and humans' technical orientation - puts us in very different ways of life and getting along with one another.

I could see treecats who are continuing to work out a role in close working association with the RMN (Nimitz and Alfredo at least, perhaps Samantha, are already in this category) having some sort of formal recognition of it and organization in some sort of association that can be recognized, understood, and used by both species. I wouldn't expect it to have a human-style rank structure or some sort of equivalence to one, not anything remotely close at least. Warrant officer ranks, specifically, are too likely to create a dangerous illusion that the treecats are just like us only smaller, furry, and inherently armed.

If the treecats have some sort of social organizations that cut across clans - memory singers as a class, for a hypothetical example - maybe whatever those are would serve as a basis, but I doubt whatever it is is hierarchical. Maybe - just maybe - by now they've picked up the notion of such an organization from us and may adapt it for their own, and maybe - just maybe - whatever that is, is something they can share with us so we can use it too. But that's crossing fingers and going way out on a speculative limb.

cthia wrote:But the defense attorney must be a putz. Trials are supposed to be fair and impartial. His first motion should be...

A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and its defendant(s) to another community in order to obtain jurors who can be more objective in their duties.

Everyone on the ship can be heard sharpening pitchforks. Everyone reading about the transgression, are thinking pitchforks - at the very least. Well, I am.

SWM wrote:You are mistakenly assuming that this is like a modern capital punishment case. It is not. This is a military trial for piracy, in an era without instant communications across interstellar distances. There is no such thing as a change of venue in these circumstances. The captain has full authority (supported by international treaties) to perform a trial on site, with no appeal.

I've always been surprised, though content, that ship Captains, and the like, can sentence pirates to death and then execute them on the spot.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:You are mistakenly assuming that this is like a modern capital punishment case. It is not. This is a military trial for piracy, in an era without instant communications across interstellar distances. There is no such thing as a change of venue in these circumstances. The captain has full authority (supported by international treaties) to perform a trial on site, with no appeal.

I know that it isn't.

I'm just surprised that it isn't, as reflected in my opening post.

I've always been surprised, though content, that ship Captains, and the like, can sentence pirates to death and then execute them on the spot.

And do note the though content.

Manticore is so chock full of morals, scruples and values. My main concern is for the one poor sap that may not actually deserve it. But as someone else noted, it isn't something that's necessarily done. Oftentimes they're turned over to the local authorities. But if you're the RMN, you have to be leery of Captains that will burn all pirates as a matter of choice.