Some thoughts on SC procedures

[Claude Desmoulins]

On the SC agenda are a couple of procedural discussions, I'm putting my thoughts here to encourage public comments and so that there is a place to start the discussion. There are two issues:

1. The nature of petitions

Petitions to the SC take a variety of forms, and are sometimes clear and sometimes not about what they want to be done. I would propose the following:

All petitions of must consist of two parts
I. Claim of Violation - this will explain what violation the petitioner believes has occurred. It will be one of two types:
A. Claim that an RA act violates the founding documents
or
B. Claim that a citizen has violated law or procedure

The claim will include an explanation of why the action or law is a violation.

II Request of remedy
In the case of a type A claim, remedy will consist of the annulment of the RA act. In the case of a type B claim, petitioner should clearly state the desired remedy.

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(for example, the recent Lundquist petition requested the remedy of annulling and re balloting the July election)

2. Archives and records

The SC has an unfilled archivist position. I wonder how well it would work even if we had one, since all there are at the moment are transcripts. Since SC members tend to be verbose, the reasoning behind things usually ends up in the transcripts. Unfortunately the reasoning is hard to dig out of all that discussion. The SC could start publishing decisions to explain its reasoning, though it may make the SC too much like a RL appelate court for the comfort of some. This is all important since we have a common law system and these decisions are , at least in theory, supposed to guide future ones, They can't do that if you can't find the reasoning.

[Rose Springvale]

While i've been told at least twice that there are due process protections built into the SC process, i've had occasion to experience otherwise. In a democracy, this seems to be critical. Therefore i ask that any time a complaint against a citizen or public official is filed, that that citizen have notice, an opportunity to confront her accusers and cross examine, and an opportunity to be heard BEFORE or SIMULTANEOUSLY with the presentation of the complainants case. Without actual notice, the SC should not take any evidence or even allow a complaint to be stated, especially if records are to be published of the same.

There are other systems for emergency matters to be handled, so there seems to me to be no reason to handle such petitions otherwise.

[Claude Desmoulins]

Perhaps something like this:

Type B Claims must include a list of the accused(by name) (Question: What about when a branch , for example RA or SC, is accused? Who is responsible for responding? OTOH, there should be a public transcript of anything the RA or SC does.)
The accused are notified at the same time as the members of the SC.
They are invited to submit a written response to the claim within x hours. At the end of that time both the petition and any response are made public.

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Also I think there ought be a distinction in procedure based on whether there is a dispute of fact. When, as with the Chancellor removal, there is not a dispute of fact,and the question is only one of did what happened follow the "rules", things ought to work a bit differently than when people disagree about what happened.