Intent

So, today you get another worldbuilding post as part of answering a reader question; specifically, concerning the accidental/deliberate distinction and other questions of guilt and innocence in Imperial jurisprudence.

This is, as you might expect, a mite complicated.

So the first, and the easiest, part of the Curial court's job is obviously the done/not done determination. Did the accused actually do the deed or not? If not, there's nothing more to do but the apologies.

(And the compensation, which is why the Empire maintains an extremely high, Japan-like rate of finding that yes, people actually did. Since a not done finding - legally innocent or not proven¹ - has consequences for the people who brought the case in the first place, the Watch Constabulary and the Office of Investigation and Pursuit do not generally bring cases which are not pretty damn convincing.)

Once that they did do the deed is established, they are absolutely, definitely going to have to pay the reparation - full weregeld, and damages a minimum of onefold - but the exact degree of reparation and any penalties assessed depends on the level of intent that the court then has to go on to determine.

There are seven of them:

1. Failed benevolence
2. Accident, or unknowing action
3. Error in judgment/non-willful negligence
4. Temporary insanity
5. Unenlightened self-interest/unmutuality
6. Chronic unenlightened self-interest/unmutuality
7. Entropism

What the final verdict and associated sentence are depends on a matrix of charges on the one axis and the level of intent on the other. So, let's go through them, not in order, and talk examples and possibilities.

5. Unenlightened Self-Interest / Unmutuality

This is the standard guilty verdict. You did the actus reus, you had the mens rea, you knowingly committed the crime and intended to commit the crime, ergo you're guilty.

As such you must pay the full traditional reparations (i.e, full weregeld and damages according to the Fivefold Rule), plus the other penalties for the crime as defined in the relevant statute. (This includes memetic rehab and recon and/or other forms of rectification, but also attainder, revocation of citizen-shareholdership, deportation/exile, writs of baculum, outlawry, etc., and of course, execution.)

6. Chronic Unenlightened Self-Interest / Unmutuality

The court is not pleased to see you back again. And being aware of the statistics where chronic reoffenders (especially in these days of meme rehab²) are concerned in re their contribution to the overall crime rate, they get less pleased very rapidly indeed.

Guilty, full reparations, plus a scaling factor which increases rapidly at this point and forward. Should you be enough of a clue-immune damn fool to keep going, there is a very good chance those penalties will become terminal in short order.

7. Entropism

Technically, a verdict of guilty. In actuality, a verdict of evil.

The distinction, essentially, is that unenlightened self-interest implies that you have an understandable and maybe even sympathetic end in mind, just chose very wrong means to attain it. Theft and fraud are wrong (m'kay?), but everyone can understand desire for stuff. Even where murder is concerned, one can sometimes grasp I could no longer endure the existence of this person in my universe. Those are things that we can fix, belike.

Entropism is the category of I just like to make the world worse.

At the high end, this includes serial killers, rapists, terrorists, animal abusers, etc. ad naus., obviously.

But they can assess entropism for almost any crime. Unenlightened self-interest for theft, for example, implies that it's about the gain. If the discerners who look at your mind-state conclude that for you it's more about causing other people loss, well, that's entropism. If you're a rioter or a vandal who just likes smashing, burning, or otherwise desecrating stuff? Entropism. Hell, if you're a sufficiently chronic litterer because you enjoy or just don't care about enshittifying the place... well, that's still entropism.

If your crime was particularly minor, then they might be satisfied with simply having you fined, nerve-stapled, slapped with a criminal indenture to assure repayment, and the indenture subsequently sold to one of those Peripheral companies that has a lot of shit-work that needs done and is always in need of meat for the machine. With a note attached to the effect that if you turn up at an Imperial port of entry in the future, you are to be refused entry and summarily tossed out the airlock if you make a fuss about it.

(This is not because of any belief in the virtue of corrective labor or time to think and rehabilitate yourself, to be clear. It's just that they despise you with the fire of an angry sun and any value that can be extracted from your continued existence is some small recompense for having to tolerate said existence thus far.)

But usually entropism, in addition to the full reparations, means straight to the lethal chamber³. Civilization has no place for you.

Now back to the lighter side of the judgments, with -

4. Temporary Insanity

There is only a provision in the levels of intent for temporary insanity because permanent insanity isn't something that goes through the Curial courts⁴.

But if you're to-the-legal-standard insane and thus unfit to stand trial, you've been filtered out effectively at arraignment and handed over to the Guardians to handle⁵. Those whose permanent insanity is later cured are reinserted into the court system at that point as their insanity is then, by definition, temporary.

Verdict: insane⁶. In this case, you have to pay the full reparations. Other penalties will be scaled by the court in accordance to the degree of your diminished responsibility: they will punish you for your bad choices, but not for your inability to make choices, effectively, and it is on a scale because that's not a perfect bright line. Except the mandatory⁷ meme rehab - if not already undergone - the need for which has just been demonstrated.

(A secondary not-penalty that tends to come along with this one is that you will suffer an immediate loss of tort insurance cover, with all the associated limitations, since they're the people who are supposed to assure that you aren't prone to this sort of thing and obviously they got it wrong. But that's not a formal penalty, that's just actuarial reclassification.)

3. Error in Judgment / Non-Willful Negligence

You didn't actually intend to commit a crime, nor did you intentionally fail to exercise your general duty of care not to commit crimes. You just fucked up.

(Say, you decided to cut down a tree in your yard and accidentally dropped it on your neighbor's flitter. Or you got very distracted and walked out of a store without paying for something⁸.)

Verdict: accident. However, you must pay reparations under the Threefold Rule (this serving to compensate the other party for the inconvenience, as well as being an incentive not to fuck up). No penalties are assessed, although the court costs can be considered a reminder that you should have sorted this out yourself like a gentlesoph rather than dragging the legal system into it⁹.

(Depending on the severity of your fuckup, your tort insurer may wish to have a word or two with you about reducing your cover.)

2. Accident, or Unknowing Action

It was a complete accident, and you might not even have known about it.

(Lightning struck the tree while you weren't even there. You tripped and fell into the thing you damaged.)

Verdict: accident. You must still pay reparation (under the Onefold Rule) because you're still technically responsible for the accident, but since you didn't fuck up, you can't be incentivized to do better, and there's also no point or justice in punishing you for it. (Same point about court costs as the one above.)

1. Failed Benevolence

You were trying to do good (often, but not always, something covered by the Altruism Statutes), and something went wrong. It didn't work out.

(You tried to shove someone out of the way of a vehicle, and injured them. You tried to administer medical assistance in an emergency and it went wrong. You intervened to stop a crime, and a bystander was hurt.)

Verdict: accident. As with the above, you must usually still pay reparation under the Onefold Rule, but the court recognizes that you were trying to do the right thing, and they do not want to disincentivize people from doing the right thing.

As such, they may waive the reparation if the evidence shows that, as in the first example, they were injured less than in the counterfactual case and there were no apparent reasonable alternatives, or partially/fully cover it out of recognition that you, an amateur, did what the professional Constabulary¹⁰ weren't there to do.

At the very least, it will be noted on the public record that you tried, and it is recognized.

1. Imperial jurisprudence doesn't ascribe to either the notion "innocent until proven guilty" or "guilty until proven innocent". Rather, after arraignment, one "stands accused" until the court renders a verdict. Thus, the distinction here is that while innocent is a vindication, not proven merely suspends proceedings until there is enough evidence to render a verdict one way or the other.
2. To be fair, it's also very hard to get this one in these days of meme rehab and psychedesign. It within-delta-of-always sticks. As such, it's something of a historical spandrel, with a minor exception for foreign misdemeanants.
3. Entropists neither deserve nor receive the dignity of a firing squad.
4. In the modern day, for one thing, the Guardians of Our Harmony should have caught this long before it ever became a problem.
5. "Handle", in this case, means "try to fix you". Emphasis on try. They've got a lot better at this in the modern era, but do bear in mind the various limitations we've brought up before, which include that if "fix you" crosses the threshold of identity that means "basically kill you and resurrect someone else in your body", they won't do that. Also that if you prove to be unfixable, they will mercifully kill you rather than condemn you to a lifetime of clawing at the walls and being heavily drugged into a safe-to-handle state. That may be life, but it ain't living.
6. Not guilty-by-reason-of-insanity, or such formulation, because so far as the legal standard is concerned, being insane implies that you could not have had mens rea. Which means you aren't guilty. You're just insane.
7. I should probably mention that meme rehab is, very technically, not mandatory in this or other cases. If you are bound and determined to die as your insane and/or criminal self, the court always permits you the euthanasia option so to do.
8. Back in the days when that was possible.
9. Of course, if you tried to sort it out like a gentlesoph and the other party dragged it into court, the court may well assess the costs against them as a reprimand for general ungentlesophly and disharmonious behavior, even though they were technically in the right.
10. For those who don't know, the Watch Constabulary includes the Empire's paramedical and emergency-response services.