The Defense Presents the Following Evidence:
- Taylor is alive, and therefore cannot have been murdered. This throws a wrench into proceedings that takes a good four days to sort out, with the only other legal precedents of similar situations not quite being applicable. Eventually it is ruled that as Taylor left a corpse behind she was murdered, but she isn't legally dead on account of, you know, not being dead. A bunch of extremely precise wording is used to avoid implicating Ruggedizer as a defendant, since everyone agrees that would be incredibly wrong morally, not to mention flatly incorrect.
But Taylor is not alive. There may be a robot walking around that looks and acts like her, but no court would be willing to set legal precendent about life and death in this way. The legal implications are massively contentious. Likewise, this is not a defence that could be used, because it requires that this precedent already have been established. As is, this just proves that someone knows how to make realistic robot duplicates.
There is no way that everybody would agree on this. Instead, it's absolutely in the defence's interests to say that while the trio did injure Taylor severely, she was alive when she left the building, and that Ruggedizer verifiably killed her. Arguments over whether the death counts as part of the trio's crime anyway, whether it was a form of euthanasia, or something else, are going to tie things up in knots. Saying that since she was about to die it was okay to kill her early aren't going to be well-received. After all, there's "Was Ruggedizer a trained medical professional or a biotinker? No? Then if she'd kept Taylor at the scene, she
might have been stabilised long enough for Panacea to get there and save her life. We don't know, and because Ruggedizer killed her, we will never know." That right there is a serious problem. If she'd tried to keep her alive and Taylor died anyway? Not an issue. But she deliberately performed an act that she knew would kill Taylor. Big problem. The defence would argue that Taylor was indeed murdered, but not by the trio.
There's plenty of people who would not consider NewTaylor to be the same person. They'd even have a point, since Worm doesn't do souls. They may not know that, but it does mean that mechanically, the only possible way this would have worked out would be as a duplicate, not a transfer. And since there's no reason that this couldn't be repeated, that means that in a couple of weeks, there could be dozens of her. Which is the original? The first off the assembly line? This is, at best, a clone. Earth Bet would have precendent for that due to tinkers, albeit she's mechanical, not organic, but they'd be considered separate (albeit very similar) individuals, and not the original.
Taylor couldn't even give evidence, as there is nothing to say that her uploaded mind wasn't altered in the process. After all, in principle, she could be reprogrammed or hacked. Who can prove that her mind and memories are purely Taylor's and untainted? The defence will love that.
This is why going into detail on a court case is something that a lot of people want to avoid in stories. It gets bogged down with details and legal interpretations. The law is extremely complex, and with the things involved here it would be a nightmare that took forever to get moving, and potentially even years to reach any kind of conclusion. A trial for a case with this many complications being set for less than a month after the incident? That's utterly inadequate to collect evidence, distribute it, analyse it, search for things to fill in the holes, etc. and build a good case. I'd expect the Defence to be the ones wanting as a trial asap, and the Prosecution to not want one. It being the other way around makes no sense,as the more rushed it is, the more the Defence benefits. There are a lot of defendents listed above. And they couldn't be packaged as a single case either, so it would take a long time to run through them all. That's not even taking appeals into account. I can see plenty of issues with the proceedings listed above.
