Felony Violation

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Intent

To define a category of crime which includes intentional and incidental violation of rights that cause injury, death, or irreparable harm to the victim.

Proposal

A felony violation is any intentional or incidental violation of rights which causes injury, death, or irreparable harm to a person.

Actions exercising the right of defense are excluded to the extent that they are lawful or reasonable under the circumstances in which they occurred.

Judgment for felony violations shall include corrective action where possible, monetary compensation to the victim or the victim’s family, imprisonment, and fines.

In cases involving public property or public spaces including land, water, and air, the victim is the people and they are represented by the government.

In cases involving multiple perpetrators, a judgment shall include all of them and shall be more harsh to the criminal leaders, organizers, and planners.

Definitions

Intentional violation is a deliberate, intended, voluntary, willful, or reckless violation of rights.

Incidental violation is a violation of rights that occurs because of or as a consequence of or as part of an attempted crime or a criminal plan or conspiracy.

Public Space

Discussion

Examples of felony violations include:

* Assault and battery

* Murder

* Mutilation, including any injuries from weapons

* Presenting false testimony in a trial which leads to wrongful conviction of an innocent person with a prison sentence exceeding one year

* Knowingly presenting false evidence in a trial which leads to wrongful conviction of an innocent person with a prison sentence exceeding one year

* Intentional unlawful behavior, such as dumping chemicals in a river instead of the appropriate disposal method, which result in death of people or irreparable injury to people or the environment

An intentional violation of rights must be punished more harshly than an incidental violation of rights. This is because an intentional violation is more morally reprehensible and in many cases it costs more effort or is more difficult to prove.

A felony violation of rights is defined by what happens to the victim, not by the method used to cause harm. This means that the criminal leader who motivated and organized a violation of rights is just as guilty as the criminal minion who physically carried it out. As a matter of equal guilt, the punishment for criminal leaders and criminal minions must be the same. However, criminal leaders must be punished even more harshly than their minions to deter future criminal leaders and to account for the fact that in many cases it’s more difficult to prove guilt for the criminal leader. When such proof is established, that criminal leader must not be allowed to escape justice with a lesser judgement.

Consider a system an asymmetry where it costs government more to prove the guilt of the criminal leader and yet they get a lesser punishment, allowing them to return to society and do it again, offloading the big consequences to their minions and getting more of the criminal rewards. Such a system promotes more criminal activity by making it lucrative to be a criminal leader.

Punishing criminal leaders even more harshly prevents the establishment of such a system y balancing the consequences to deter criminal leaders.

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