Perjury, intangible harm, and attempted crimes
This charter is never finished. I still puzzle over inconsistencies, and it's still useful reading legal blogs and wondering how the charter would handle problems.
One part I am happy with is perjury, and it seems more and more solid every time it comes up. The charter indirectly defines perjury as "authoritative misrepresentation"; words and deeds as if by an authority, and treated as "the issue at stake", ie, what the perjury tried to do. My favorite example is building a fence a foot over a property line, where the issue at stake is not the fence itself (which belongs to the neighbor same as if the unbuilt lumber had been tossed into his yard), and not even the foot of property which the neighbor has lost access to; the issue is trying to fool the public, such as anyone buying either property, or a tax appraiser. The fence is just the representation of the property line. If the fence was built by a contractor, did he make the mistake, or the owner? Was it an honest mistake, or intentional?
Perjury is defined in the charter, but there's a different part of the charter which is only an interpretation, a consequence, which I don't much like, but I think it's inevitable: intangible harm.
Charter redress is all about self-control disputes, and verdicts are limited to monetary restitution in general, although criminals can be locked up if they have shown themselves to be a danger to the public and/or incapable of exercising their self-control duty to act as competent adults. A serial rapist or burglar is a good example, or someone who carries on during the case with threats, disrupts proceedings, destroys evidence, and otherwise refuses to honor his charter commitment to resolve disputes.
Monetary restitution works well with theft and assault in general, since it includes all costs and damage: lost wages, renting a car while the dash is repaired after ripping out the radio, hospitalization and rehab, investigation, forensic labs, travel costs, bounty hunters, and so on. But it doesn't work so well for murder. You can estimate future income based on age, expected lifespan, occupation, and other factors, and as long as they are plausible, the killer hasn't got much room to claim divorce or risky hobbies would have reduced lifespan or crippling injuries. But murder and even theft and assault are more than just medical costs and damages. How do you measure the cost of children losing a father? Would remarriage have to revisit the verdict and reduce the restitution?
People would not put up with that interpretation. It's why victims want criminals to rot in jail, and why the death penalty is so popular. The charter accommodates this somewhat with outlawry: complaints cannot be filed for less than the unpaid verdict debt. Burglars find their houses emptied of everything nice. Shoplifters find themselves relieved of beer and ice cream coming out of grocery stores. And murderers and rapists find they can't complain about being locked up, or even killed in cold blood; not on their own, not by their families, not by charities, not by anyone.
But this only works when the murder restitution is high enough. What loss of income is there for killing an old widow, or a disabled child whose future income is more likely to be negative? Sure, verdict guardianship can make up for some of this, and the public is going to prioritize keeping such despicable criminals behind bars or kill them to save the money. But those are special cases. Outlawry is great because criminals become outlaws by their own crimes, without needing vague and contentious verdicts making arbitrary decisions which the public may not agree with.
Peeping Toms are a simple example of where monetary restitution falls flat. Someone watches you through a bathroom or bedroom window. What crime has he committed? Trespassing is about all, and if he watches from the sidewalk or a parked car with binoculars, you don't even get that. Even with curtains, was he watching your shadow? Was the HVAC breeze opening up occasional gaps? It's creepy beyond belief, yet what restitution is there? If you catch him in the act and he confesses and offers to pay all costs right away, what is that, $5 for your time to run outside? Even if you do take it to redress and pay for an advisor, redress agent, hearing room, etc, restitution just pays for them. You don't get punitive damages. Victims and the public want more then just shaming the bastard.
That's where intangible harm comes in. If people were forced to accept monetary restitution for damages and costs only, they'd gin up therapy costs with their neighbor at $1000 an hour, they'd pretend to fall and require hospitalization, time off work, and any number of tricks to get some real compensation and make that peeping Tom actually suffer, and make paying for his own month in jail cheaper than plain restitution and being an outlaw who everyone can rob blind.
Besides, being intangible doesn't make it any less real. Children lose a parent, a spouse loses a life companion, parents lose their child -- how can you measure that in any real objective sense?
The charter never mentions intangible harm, only "full restitution". But coupled with the charter's reliance on public enforcement, as with outlawry and victim prosecution, it seems only logical that something along those lines will be accepted by the public and come to be almost mandatory. Coming home to find your front door broken and swinging from a burglar won't have a whole lot, but there will be some just for the victims not feeling safe in their home again. Maybe it only lasts a week or a month, but it's real damage caused by the burglar. The public won't accept a million dollars for a stolen TV, and they will probably base murder intangible harm on their perceptions of the family and gossip and innuendo, but it will at least have some basis in reality. So as much as I don't like intangible harm, it's like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: it's the worst system possible, except for all the others.
This brings me to what really has me puzzled: attempted crimes. Back up to perjury for a minute. "Issue at stake" is not defined. Most issues at stake seem pretty obvious to me. If you lie as a witness to provide an alibi which clears a friend, and that lie is proven within a day, the only real issue at stake is the extra investigative work and the delay in chasing down other evidence. But if your fake alibi implicates someone else, that is much more serious, and the issue at stake is trying to convict that other person; your perjury restitution should be whatever that poor sucker might have been nailed with. I don't care if the fake alibi was cleared up a day later or 5 minutes later; you tried to convict an innocent bystander, and you should be punished exactly as he might have been punished. If you try to frame someone for murder, you should be punished for murder, not for attempted murder on account of your attempt failing. I take this kind of perjury as one of the worst kinds of crimes possible.
But then I run headlong into my quandary: if I take a shot at somebody and miss, and they don't even realize it until someone tells them later, I have done very little damage. A hole in a wall has to be patched, and that's it. Even if you throw in some intangible harm, how much is it if the intended victim doesn't even know about it for a month?
And yet if I lie about having shot at him and am found out, that's perjury, and the issue at stake is murder. That sure doesn't sound like any kind of justice. It's not even close to fair.
Personally, I don't particularly like legacy "attempted" crimes, or conspiracy charges either. Conspiracy especially smacks of piling on charges for crimes that didn't actually happen, even though it is sometimes charged in addition to the actual crime, as if two people committing murder is somehow worse than a single DIY murderer. And if I do shoot at someone and miss, I was trying to kill them. Why shouldn't I be charged with murder?
But charter redress has no laws to break, only self-control disputes, and coercive guardianship for those who refuse to exercise their self-control duty to behave like adults or resolve disputes. All it can do for attempted murder is the (slight) damage from the attempt, and some intangible harm, which is hard to imagine ever approaching successful murder. Even if someone spends the rest of his life afraid to go out in public for fear of being shot at again, it's hard to put all the blame for that on the criminal. Therapy could probably cure it. Friends and family who get tired of his isolation will blame him, not the criminal. Get over it!
And that's my quandary for this post. How can I square murder as the issue at stake for the perjury of trying to frame someone for murder, while leaving attempted murder as having almost no intangible harm?
I can't see lessening the perjury issue at stake. Whether the penalty for murder is death or life without parole in legacy systems, or so much outlaw debt that charterites can lock you up in a concrete hellhole, that seems entirely right from trying to frame someone for murder.
I don't see how any interpretation of self-control or redress can lead to counting every attempted crime as the crime itself. Waking up from someone rattling your front door, who runs off when the light comes on, is in no way equivalent to a burglar smashing down the door and holding everybody at gunpoint while his buddy ransacks the place. Finding a bullet hole in a wall weeks later has nowhere near the trauma of someone taking 5 shots and only wounding you, or actually being dead.
About all I can do for now is rely on intangible harm to at least recognize some proportional and realistic restitution for attempted crimes. It's just not very satisfying.
Updated 2025-01-28:
I think I've come to grips with this puzzle. Perjury is for the most part an ongoing lie which can be reversed at any time. There are exceptions, of course: perjury which fines someone to penury or sends them to prison is not reversible in any ordinary sense, and if it ends in death, it's not reversible in any sense at all. But retracting false testimony or evidence while a case is in progress is reversible in varying degrees: hurt feelings, extra investigative expenses, evidence losing freshness, and reputations to restore. Some can be hard or impossible to undo. Defining perjury in the charter and calling out its issue at stake reinforces its seriousness, but also prevents a lot of quibbling about what the real harm is of exposing a frameup for murder the next day, or finding out a used car won't even make it off the lot.
But attempted crimes, such as shooting at someone and missing, are over and done with and cannot be undone, and the actual harm, even if mostly intangible, is too variable to be enshrined as any kind of issue at stake. If some celebrant shoots in the air and hits a house a mile away, the intangible harm depends very much on whether someone is at home or only finds out when they come back from vacation two weeks later.