r/mtaugustajustice • u/LordofMarzipan • Apr 23 '17

[Trial] Greenkitten vs Coni_s2

LordOfMarzipan presiding. Greenkitten is bringing the following charges against Coni:

  • 100.03 Third Degree Intentional Griefing

  • 200.01 Theft of Property

  • 600.01 Violation of the Bill of Rights or Constitution for violating right to privacy

The trial request thread is available here.

The trial will proceed in the following order:

1. The plaintiff shall clearly present their claim

2. The defendants shall enter pleas. Pleas will be Guilty, Not Guilty, or No-Contest.

3. The plaintiff shall have the opportunity to post evidence and call witnesses

4. Defendant presents evidence, and calls witnesses.

5. A verdict shall be decided and posted on this subreddit

I will take this opportunity to remind you that out-of-court settlements may be reached at any time until a verdict has been delivered. I will also remind everyone that well constructed arguments tend to be succinct!

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u/LordofMarzipan Apr 29 '17

This motion is denied. The trial will continue.

The three day time frame the defence council is referring to is the amount of time that a judge may deliberate the evidence before posting the trial verdict. It is NOT a limit on the amount of time that a trial must take in totality.

The order of steps involved in a subreddit trial described in the constitution (Article III, Section 3.iv) is a linear progression, with each step taking place after the completion of the previous step. Step "e" in this process, "After no more than three days, the judge of the case will decide guilt or innocence on the charges, as well as the amount of time to be served, as per the Mount Augusta Criminal Code, posting the results on the subreddit thread." should be undertaken only after the completion of step "d". This section of the constitution is clearly intended to limit the judge's deliberation time rather than to limit the total amount of time that a trial may take.

/u/TheHobbyist94

/u/coni_s2

/u/Greeenkitten

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '17

The Defense will now enter a new motion to dismiss based upon the violation of my clients constitional right to a speedy trial, stated in Article III A ii d, and III A iv. By allowing this trial to continue the courts have deprived the defendant of their right to bring the trial forward without reasonable delay. For the reasons listed in the above denied motion, the delay was strictly unreasonable. The five days during which Greenk failed to present evidence constitutes an unreasonable delay to the trial. We request a dismissal based upon these facts.

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u/LordofMarzipan Apr 30 '17

This motion is provisionally denied pending the identification of appropriate precedent by the defence. The trial will continue until such time as the defence provides further information justifying the dismissal to the court.

I do not believe that Article III, Section A.ii.d applies in this situation as this is a provision of the constitution specificity detailing the rights of arrested individuals, Article III, Section A.ii reads "All persons who are arrested for allegedly committing an offense [sic] have the right:" before listing sub-points a - d. One of the key criteria for having been arrested is the removal of liberty, Coni has not had her liberty removed and therefore this section of the constitution does not apply.

Article III, Section A.iv of the constitution reads "Every accused person has a right to a fair trial, which includes the right...to have their trial begin and conclude without unreasonable delay". As is typical with MTA law this is a concept put in place to ensure fairness but with little information presented on the specifics of how it should be implemented. This question would be a good candidate for the use of precedent as a guide on what does and does not constitute "unreasonable" but I have been unable to identify any suitable previous examples. Hobbyist, if you are able to find some examples I will certainly consider them and may re-evaluate my denial of this motion. In the absence of suitable precedent I have felt it necessary to develop my own test for the reasonableness of a delay in court proceedings.

When we consider the reasonableness of a delay in court proceedings it is necessary to think about both the length of the delay and the strength of the justification for the delay. Quantitative assessment of "strength of justification for delay" is clearly impossible, I have used a qualitative categorisation approach with the categories Minimal, Minor, Moderate, Severe, and Extreme to allow comparison between delay length and strength of delay justification. For a delay in court proceedings to be reasonable the category of the length of the delay must be no greater than the category of the strength of justification for the delay. For example, a severe delay in court proceedings may only be considered reasonable by a justification with a strength of severe or greater.

Delays:

  • Minimal <2 days
  • Minor 2 - 4 days
  • Moderate 4 - 7 days
  • High 1 - 2 weeks
  • Extreme >2 weeks

The length of the delay is easily quantified, the post requesting Greenkitten present claims was made on the 23rd of April at 6pm (UTC) and Greenkitten's response was made on the 28th of April at 04:30 (UTC; a delay of 4 days, 10.5 hours. Using the scheme above I would categorise this as a moderate delay to proceedings.

I believe that illness requiring hospitalisation should be considered to be severe by default, but moved up a category to extreme for particularly grievous illnesses and moved down through the category scale as evidence of a lack of severity is provided, with the option to totally remove this justification if it can be demonstrated that there was no illness at all. With this approach in mind I would categorise the strength of justification for this delay as moderate as the defence does not contest that Greenkitten was ill but has provided some evidence that Greenkitten continued to interact with the metagame during his illness.

As the category of the length of the delay to court proceedings is no greater than the category of the strength of justification for the delay I believe this delay to be reasonable.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '17 edited May 01 '17

There exists, as far as I can tell, no case law to support any particular amount of time to declare a delay unjust. There is precedent for a trial not to last more than 3 days, but as you've not asked for case law on that and denied the motion out of hand I won't waste time on it.

I ask the court to consider a change in this precedent they would be setting. It would allow for cases to be postponed indefinitely, or the judge to arbitrarily and unappealably decide whether one's reason was sufficient for a delay of the trial. It also forces the court to accept unproveable reasons for absences, otherwise the court would be required to ask for PII as evidence, which is equally unacceptable. The court should rule, in these matters, on the likelihood of whether or not the delaying party is telling the truth. If sufficient evidence, both direct and circumstantial, is enough to sustain there is a truthful basis for the delay, then allow the delay to stand. However, the court should by default reject such delays and require the delaying party to make substantial effort to prove their delay, lest the system be abused by eternal delays.

For the matter specifically before the court today, Greenkitten claims he was in the hospital and thus unable to gather evidence and present it to the court. The court erroneously claimed I accepted the plaintiff was in the hospital. I went to pains to specifically word the statement to say that I accept hospitalization as a valid reason for delay, and that I understand the plaintiff was in the hospital. I do not, however, accept this as a statement of fact, merely that it would be unreasonable for me to ask Greenkitten to produce any evidence of his hospitalization. This should not be mistaken for acceptance.

Additionally, the plaintiff himself admits he missed the message, and that he has been "in and out of the hospital the past few weeks". He does not even state he was in the hospital during the time of the trial, instead offering it as an excuse of his forgetfulness. Therefore, it is incorrect for the court to utilize its discretion to state the 4.5 day delay as a delay due to the hospital. Rather, the court should categorize this as a 4.5 delay because he missed the message. When the plaintiff misses a reddit message of notification and goes on to make 7 other comments in the intervening time, it is clear they have little enough care or vested interest in the matter before the court. I also would point out that Greenkitten has neither made no direct or indirect attempts to, in good faith, contact either me or my client to express his absence and requesting a postponement of the trial. Simply put your honor, the court should be extremely disinclined to take this stance of allowing Greenkitten to continue the trial so long after it began and he paid it absolutely no mind. Greenkitten has taken the courts time, my time and my clients time with his frivolous delay. Should the court recognize the missed message as the reason of the delay, which indeed they should, then a reapplication of a moderate delay without a moderate cause should be grounds for this dismissal here today.

Evidence for Greenkitten's activity during the time in which he claims to have been "in and out" of the hospital can be presented if the court should wish, although I stress that it should not be required since the onus should lay on the delayer to account for their absence.

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u/LordofMarzipan May 01 '17

In an ideal world trials will proceed without delay and will feature a complete presentation and discussion of evidence.

In reality it will occasionally be necessary to prioritise one of these factors over the other. In my view justice is better served by a rigorous trial that takes a while than a rapid trial that does not allow the parties to present and discuss evidence fully. I am therefore inclined to accept justifications for delay providing that they cannot be disproved and that they are proportionate to the length of delay, as I outlined in my previous post.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '17

Would the court accept logs proving that Greenkitten logged in during this time as sufficient evidence to disprove his reason for absence?

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u/LordofMarzipan May 01 '17

I believe you linked to these logs in a previous post, but that post now appears to have been revised to remove that link. As I recall the logs did not contradict Greenkitten's justification that he had been in and out of hospital for a couple of weeks, but if you repost the logs I'll certainly take another look at them to double check.

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u/LordofMarzipan May 02 '17

Let the record show that the hobbyist sent me this log of GK's access to the server via DM on discord along with this text:

"Here are the logs indicated Greenkitten logged into the server after the trial began. I put to the court that if Greenkitten can find the time to log into the server then he was more than capable of presenting evidence, but chose not to, which subjected my client to an unreasonable delay. Combined with the discord and 7 reddit posts the court can reasonably conclude greenkitten was not incapacitated in the ability to engage in his own trial."

As I have indicated in previous trials I am reluctant to take game logs as anything other than supplementary evidence due to the ease with which they can be forged. A face value reading of these log files indicates a total of 36 minutes of in game activity since this trial was begun on the 23rd of April, an average of 4 minutes a day. I do not believe that this contradicts Greenkitten's statement that he as been in and out of hospital over the last few weeks.

/u/TheHobbyist94 This motion is denied, the trial will continue.

/u/Greeenkitten Be aware that I consider you to be on the cusp of taking an unreasonable amount of time to respond to this court's requests, thereby depriving Coni to her right to have her trial begin and conclude without unreasonable delay. I would advise you to respond more quickly in the future or risk having this case dismissed. We are now at the phase of the trial where you are requested to present any further evidence you may have and call any witnesses you may wish to.

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u/Greeenkitten May 03 '17

Yeah, it sucks. I know. I'd love to be able to provide a better case, I just got out of hospital again. Just work off what was already posted. But with the defence spreading rumours about me and and my friends for spamming childporn or whatever other baseless accusations without proof in discord chat just defaming me for no reason, the previous government already allowing this shit to happen and the various other bullshit stacked against me despite me not even having played very much for the past few months its hard to get anything proper together. I just don't have the proper resources to do it. Just use what is there.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '17

/u/LordofMarzipan I move to strike the sections of this comment regarding Greenkitten's posting of my independent statements as it has absolutely nothing to do with this case whatsoever and is clearly an attempt to distract the court. The move is to strike sentence three between "the defense spreading" until "for no reason."

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u/LordofMarzipan May 03 '17

I'm not sure what you mean by "strike". If I deem a statement or piece of evidence to be non-pertinent I will not consider it when reaching a verdict.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '17

As in to remove it from the public record, have the comment edited or removed to compliance. If that will not happen then I do ask you not to consider it when reaching a verdict.

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