We need Misdemeanors

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Samantha Fuller
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We need Misdemeanors

Post by Samantha Fuller »

There is a lot of plywood junk accumulating in Neufreistadt. It has been proposed to give each offender a sarcastic note and a giveaway.
The problem with that is the offender would recognize the sarcasm but would have no whey of knowing how seriously we regarded his actions.

Part of the reason that no one properly scolds the offenders is that Banning is a one size fits all sledgehammer. Our marshals understandably don't ban someone just because they rezed a piece of plywood. They are even understandably reluctant ban someone over an abandoned vehicle so usually they do nothing. Unfortunately there isn’t any in-between punishments supported by LL. I'd like to float the idea of authorizing our marshals to give out misdemeanor tickets backed up by short bans that would be appealable. Specifically 3 classes of misdemeanors.

Class C Misdemeanor Littering would be for rezing and abandoning a single prim and would be banning for a 1day + (1-3 days undetermined to allow marshals time to process paperwork and un ban ) from the time the litter is cleaned up or a 100L fine (basically a slap on the wrist :) )

Class B Misdemeanor Littering would be for 2 to 30 prims and involve a weeks ban plus 1-3 days or a 1,000L fine.

Class A Misdemeanor Littering would be for more than 30 prims, Repeat Class C Misdemeanors, unauthorized venders, donation boxes or scripts possibly dangerous to sim. and involve a months plus 1-3 days ban or a 10,000L fine. We should also give marshals a lot of flexibility of which type of ticket to write.

Such a system would require each Marshal or person acting as Marshal to keep a record of who they banned, when they were banned, how long they are suppose to be banned, what for, and any agravatigating or mitigating circumstances. They would have to check it regularly to see who needs unbanning. When updated they would have to send a copy to the Head marshal (Probably the Chancellor) who would have to consolidate all the list (cut & paste) and send out updated copy of the consolidated list. The head marshal could then place an updated no mod copy in the Ratheus for the public. Such would be a lot of work for our officials (at least in the short run in the long run habit & premade tickets would be fast ) but would give us a lot of extra flexibility when dealing with less serous cases. Plus if we make our [u:132c937q] Island and/or CDS ban list with dates & reasons[/u:132c937q] public other landowner and estate managers will adopt it or preferably portions of it giving our bans more teeth. 8)

Here have some rope, its free! :)
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Post by Beathan »

This is a good starting point.

However, there is no practicable way to fine people -- especially strangers. Banning is all we have -- and banning might unduly alienate folks.

I think that we should rather deputize residents -- especially those who are active in locating litter as seen in the forum -- with the power to remove litter.

Beathan

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Samantha Fuller
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Post by Samantha Fuller »

Beathan you missed the point. :) The idea is to develop a punishment between permanent banning and nothing. In 95% + these cases the bans would normally expire before the miscreant returns. I said normally because human nature being what it is when told they are banned a large percentage of avatars will return just to se if its true :!: Sense the idea is to tell them we would be [u:2d221mja] trying [/u:2d221mja] to alienate the miscreants to some extent :) . The fines would be for the avatars willing to say "I've done wrong, how do I make it right" and most would be paid by local residents who simply forgot to clean up or lost track of a prim for whatever reason :) .

There are other more efficient ways to clean up the litter but if we took that route we wouldn’t be Neufreisdstadt, but jut another well run sim :lol: .

Here have some rope, its free! :)
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Post by Carolyn Saarinen »

I favour public flogging myself.

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Diderot Mirabeau
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Re: We need Misdemeanors

Post by Diderot Mirabeau »

I agree that it could be useful to think about a layered hierarchy of sanctions with regard to offenses committed by people visiting our sims. However, I feel that the present proposal imposes a large extent of administration upon people entrusted with the job of marshalling the peace. Also I'm not sure I'd be entirely comfortable with having each marshall maintain his own little list of banned persons and when they were supposed to be taken off. I'd prefer this to be handled centrally although probably not by the SC as this august body has a horrible track record in punctuality - and I'm saying this as a member of the same.

An alternative idea might be to impose a mild fine on people depending on the extent of their transgression and then ban them until they agreed to pay the fine. However, this might give us a reputation as the blackmail sim and most likely not many of those casual visitors would even bother to revisit anyway so that would be a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy and bad press for mostly no gain.

I still personally favour dropping a greeting on the people leaving litter behind perhaps with an introductory message a bit more stern than the wording I proposed. As I've said before people visiting our sim are actually indicating an interest in it. The fact that they leave a little litter behind - well, a large proportion of our citizens violate our covenants every day. And what do we do about that?

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Post by Beathan »

Diderot --

I'm not in favor of deputizing marshalls to maintain private banlists. That gives too much power to the marshalls. However, I am in favor of allowing more people -- people of proven responsibility who have shown interest in policing litter -- with the power to return or remove the offensive objects.

Until the Lindens give us greater estate owner or penal powers, I don't see that we have the ability to have nuanced punishments.

With regard to public flogging, I'm afraid that that will not work. Given the prevalence of masochism in SL, too many folks would enjoy it. On the other hand, it might improve tourism.

However, if we go there, why not keep things theme-based. We could have firing squads or trial by schlager duel in NF and crucifictions in CN. Ironically, these "capital" punishments, in SL, would be less severe than mere deportation.

On a related note, have we considered making our new sim a penal colony? We could then impose punishments on citizens by banning them, for a time or permanently, from the central sims -- removing them to a penal sim, which acts as a penal colony rather than a prison, as punishment for crime. This is a half-baked idea, I admit, but it might be something we can do under current LL protocols.

Beathan

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Samantha Fuller
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Post by Samantha Fuller »

The whole point is to break out of the limitations of the LL tools and no matter how you cut it that’s going to require a bit of work on the part of our officials :) However with cut and pasting the name from the owner box onto a pre-made notecard and putting x's by the appropriate line we hopefully can minimize the paperwork in most cases, leaving comments for when the marshal feels there are special circumstances that need to be recorded.

The proposal is for one centrally maintained public ban list by the by the head marshal who would be the Chancellor. Appeals would still go to the SC as usual. Separate working draft versions would have to be held by each marshal because they are logged on at separate times. The idea was for each marshal to cross check the list to ensure that when people are suppose to be removed they are. However this could be a problem if each marshal relied on the others to do so, there is a name for such phenomena based on an tragic case but I forgot the what it is.

To clarify an earlier point we can never apply very much coercion in SL but we can alienate people all out of proportion to the inconvenience or cost. :lol:

Last edited by Samantha Fuller on Tue Jan 23, 2007 1:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Samantha Fuller
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Post by Samantha Fuller »

When we have a violent greifer who we permanently ban we can invite them back temporally for their own hanging or other execution. :lol: That whey they get one last drama and we get a reputation as a law and order sim :D

Here have some rope, its free! :)
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Post by Flyingroc Chung »

Why we arent we using autoreturn?

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Post by Sleazy_Writer »

[quote="Samantha Fuller":vtoixws2]When we have a violent greifer who we permanently ban we can invite them back temporally for their own hanging or other execution. :lol: That whey they get one last drama and we get a reputation as a law and order sim :D[/quote:vtoixws2]
Heheh, I wonder who would lend his/her avatar for a hanging :-) Do we really want that reputation? We could of course ask the Texas sim for that, since they have their own gallows :-) Maybe we could even ask Texas to join the CDS, since it has even occurred in real life (Texas being democratic).

FR > 'Why no autoreturn' : I think it's because we want CDS-ers to be able to put something on the Platz/Forum/public land in an easy way.
I'm really sure how to do this, but I think we should use the settings in such a way that moving objects into a parcel is allowed, but not creating or dropping.

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Post by Samantha Fuller »

Auto return and to a lesser extent no build are clumsy with collaborative projects the parcel must be set to a group then any items not set to group are returned and many of our public structures are set to groups that we no longer use. :(

Edit
In order to do an execution of a griefer you need their promise of coperation and several marshals ready to freze, mute or eject in case of last muinet uncoperation or atempted rescues, ect. Even then its not certian to go down by the script :) .

Here have some rope, its free! :)
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Post by Aliasi Stonebender »

[quote="Beathan":1d683cly]Diderot --

I'm not in favor of deputizing marshalls to maintain private banlists. That gives too much power to the marshalls. However, I am in favor of allowing more people -- people of proven responsibility who have shown interest in policing litter -- with the power to return or remove the offensive objects.
[/quote:1d683cly]

I might point out I've already taken steps to this, re: Antonius Camus' 'caretaker' role.

I am reluctant to request volunteer labor for this, especially as the main offense (litter) has a MUCH simpler cure:

Turn on autoreturn on the public lands. A short one for the plazas and roads; a more lengthy one (three hours, perhaps) for public event areas. Some group and unavailability of the owner-of-record constraints prevent us from doing this fully in Neufreistadt, but Colonia Nova can easily accomodate. I have had this proposal in mind for some time, but I believe a major change such as this would require the input of the Representative Assembly, not mere perogative of the Chancellor. (Even if it isn't strictly necessary, it does provide for the 'regular public input' of Executive decisions.)

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