Thoughts on the rulings:
- confessions under torture are worthless, people will say whatever you want to hear, so the proof of sabotage is nonexistent
- the road might have been built by the kings of winter but it's clearly not currently handled as a Stark road, otherwise they would be the ones collecting tolls to pay for maintaining it
- the road still need maintained and I expect that duty has fallen to the houses it goes through, so zero tolls is unsustainable
- on the other hand, the clearest way to establish you haven't engineered a disaster is to not profit from it overly much. Reducing tolls to support your neighbours until they can rebuild from it rather than profiting from their misery would quell any doubt
Probably reduced toll until the dam is rebuilt in exchange for an apology for the unproven accusations?
Edit: apparently the Boltons maintain the road? If so it's up to them who gets tolled on it.
Anyway I think the current top votes are wrong headed, there's zero proof beyond a convenient story and a confession under torture, which we can't even verify because the witness is dead. It's just as convenient to assume the dam failed naturally and they grabbed a random vagrant to accuse.
Deny us evidence? Make our job harder? Sucks for your case.
Edit: updating to the main vote against the "evidence"
[] [First] Side with House Whitehill, Keep the Tolls in place.
[] [First] Side with the Whitehills and keep the tolls in place. Make it clear to the court that by torturing the sabotager to death the Forresters denied the court the ability to assess his testimony, thus both foiling the court's ability to examine potentially valuable evidence as well as leaving the foresters with no evidence to their claims, forcing you to rule against them.
I sympathize, but in the cultural context we're operating in, the alleged saboteur's confession under torture is considered as a valid form of evidence, fucked up as this may be. Given that in-character logic (Rhaenyra herself would realistically consider this evidence), and the fact that the whole event is kinda sus and it's quite possible that the Whitehills DID sabotage the dam, I proposed 'halfsies' arrangement on damages for the dam rather than charging the Whitehills the full amount. That makes it clear that we're punishing the Forresters for torturing a witness to death, without doing something that would be unrealistically outside the envelope of plausible in-character decisions like "completely ignoring the good reputation of a noble house" or "decreeing that torture is not a valid way to get confessions," awesome though it would be if we could just do those things on the regular.
Could we send him to the wall but only after he has seen to his family's recovery maybe? They'll still struggle but at least they might be through the worst of their current situation.
I don't think I'll win a write in at that point though.
[] [Third] Send him to the Wall
Well, I keep suggesting "compensate the Starks by making him their tenant farmer" as something that largely solves the problem and will seem more merciful than maiming him or sending him to the Wall. But that hasn't got any traction.
What kind of logic is this? How are they supposed to prove this?
Well, since they presumably knew before they got here the nature of the accusation, they might reasonably be asked to present, say, a copy of their own records where they list all their armsmen. Then they could say "so, Lord Forrester, what was the name of this supposed armsman of ours who you captured, Joe Smith, oh yeah, we have a Joe Smith and he's still alive." Or they could say "so, Lord Forrester, what was his name, oh, Fred Applebarrel, no, we have no one by that name and never have." And yes, theoretically such documents could be a forgery, but it would be
something and their documents are inherently just as credible as the Forresters' account of the torture confession.
The fact that the Lighthills haven't even tried to do this suggests that for one reason or another, they can't even make a credible attempt. Either they know that they don't keep good records of their own armsmen, or they know that one or more of their armsmen have recently deserted or are otherwise unaccounted for making things hard to prove, or it actually was one of their armsmen that did it and know it perfectly well.
In the last of the three cases, I have no sympathy for them at all. In the first two cases I'm somewhat sympathetic, but it's a sad reality that if you keep shitty records and then get called into civil court, you can sometimes lose a case you might otherwise have won.
Theoretically, it's impossible to prove a negative, sure. But the fact that they didn't even try, by the rather loose standards of what qualifies as evidence when presented by a noble in a medieval court, is definitely something that undermines their case within the Westerosi framework.
Yeah the issue is not just that this is a torture confession. It's a secondhand account of one.
The presence of multiple witnesses to the torture confession, including at least one nobleman and also a maester, makes the account we have of the torture confession the Westerosi equivalent of a notarized copy.
We'd be on much better ground to say "the guy you tortured lied to you" than to say "you lied to us about what he said," so the fact that it's a secondhand account of a torture confession doesn't undermine the evidentiary value of the confession any further than "it's a torture confession" already does.
People in general you need to trim down your write-ins a bit. Rhaenyra is very much not a legal scholar and is very much out of her depth in this situation.
Tell you what, if you're willing to hold a second-round vote, I'm willing to trim my write-in. Otherwise, there's a vote fragmentation problem because a lot of people have already voted...
reason.com
