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Wormverse ideas, recs, and fic discussion thread 1
- Thread starter Yog
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There's some debate over whether people can get out. It's seemed to imply that, but if so a lot of events don't make sense.
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Now, this is an area where there's a lot of confusion, because some courts said some things, and the Supreme Court, for instance, thought that there was nothing wrong with sending someone to life in prison for stealing a hundred dollars worth of children's video tapes, in a 5-4 decision split exactly and totally along partisan lines, in defense of a policy that led to massive prison overcrowding with people being put away for life after minor crimes that would have, without three-strikes, gotten small sentences.
So it all honestly depends on which lawyers and constitutional scholars you ask, so it's not really something we could discuss here except to say that yes, it's possible that the Supreme Court could sign off on all of it, because they've signed off on all sorts of things before.
And let's just leave it at that, rather than getting into another debate, since it has relatively little to do with Worm.
*****
TLDR: The Supreme Court could approve of it and say it's constitutional, in Worm-verse. Plenty of lawyers and scholars will disagree with them in the strongest terms, but if the right "Tough on Crime" members get in, they'd shred the constitution in a blender and drink it down, so.
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As part of the discussion that might help things, consider this: the Wormverse is a place of rising crime in which their response to Parahumans, when translated into real-life, only jammed up the works and increased the number of non-violent prisoners without showing any of the results. So yeah, Worm-verse legal stuff is clearly Worst Timeline sorta stuff. Society's breaking down.
It honestly makes sense, in an unnerving way.
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- Earth Prime
I wasn't really asking about whether they should interpret it that way or not. Certainly, courts have ruled things Constitutional when many argue they are not, and conversely, ruled things Unconstitutional on what many consider to be flimsy pretexts.
I'm more asking, to what would you point to say, "The Birdcage is Unconstitutional," if you were trying to make a serious, non-spurious argument about it?
Again: not asking to debate the merits of it and whether it "is" or "should be" considered Constitutional. Just...is there something in the Constitution to which you can point to say it is not? Enough that a debate would seem reasonable to have, even if not enough to unambiguously resolve the debate. (I hope it's better than "cruel and unusual" clauses, but if that's the best, that's the best.)
Night
Widow Null
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- Hoff
Cruel and unusual is probably the best you've got though it could be argued the Birdcage is effectively an abdication of governmental responsibility and a conspiracy to violate someone's civil rights on the basis that it is not, in fact, a custodial sentence and the inmates are as likely to kill you as not, in effect making it a stealth death sentence for many people.
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I was. And what do you mean "Better than the 'cruel and unusual' clause"? Plenty of legal scholars have determined that this, and the idea of proportionality, means that a punishment must fit the crime or else it doesn't apply.
The problem, as far as it goes, is that the Supreme Court is and has always been... like, even at its best, kinda a mess.
Rummel v. Estelle - Wikipedia
A man was sentenced to life in prison for a crime worth $120, just because he'd done two similar small crimes before that just qualified as felonies, none of them violent.
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So Justice Powell is certainly someone with a legal opinion that's not 'spurious.' He lost on votes, but that's how it goes:
"(i) the penalty for a noncapital offense may be unconstitutionally disproportionate, (ii) the possibility of parole should not be considered in assessing the nature of the punishment, (iii) a mandatory life sentence is grossly disproportionate as applied to petitioner, and (iv) the conclusion that this petitioner has suffered a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights is compatible with principles of judicial restraint and federalism."[1]
It's also kinda apalling to read the arguments for the Majority opinion, because they mostly come down to, "It's not fair, but it could be worse, and we decided back in 1912 that it was fine, so fuck you."[1]
[1] It's especially galling that some of their logic is founded on Missisippi being worse, considering that Mississippi's law at the time, back in the 1960s, was designed the way it was specifically to fuck over minorities. You get them on a few relatively minor crimes (and the system's biased against them anyways), and then they're locked up for the rest of their lives, and you can put them on a chain-gang to do slave labor for you.
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So as far as it goes, the situation here is that plenty of legal scholars would (I found some of it and started getting into it before I realized it's off-topic) call the Birdcage unconstitutional, but their voices don't matter because they're not old men (or women) appointed by Congress to decide the fate of the nation's laws.
So yeah, there's probably plenty of scholars and politicians and the like looking game-eyed at it, but I'm pretty sure it'd stand up, as long as the Supreme Court served as a backstop. And because the world is falling apart, nobody has time to go, "What the fuck." Any more than they can do more than chip at that sort of thing IRL.
That too. The fact that the prison has absolutely no internal order is another aspect that edges it towards the cruel.
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Anyways, just to clarify and not start a long legal argument, there are many legal figures who would disagree, we can tell because they disagreed with similar sorts of things IRL, but just like, "Tough on crime" rhetoric held the day IRL, it probably would in the Wormverse.
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- Earth Prime
It's not something that is explored in Worm, but the concept of "those in authority" is a very interesting one in a Constitutional government. Nobody would argue, I'm sure, that if the duly-elected dog catcher were to order Dragon to detain a dog that had walked up to her suit and thought she was the friendliest thing ever, and then hand it over to him, that her programming would compel her to obey that authority figure's lawful order. Even if she thought that dog catcher was a jerk and didn't want to turn over the dog.
However, if that same dog catcher, despite being an authority figure regarding dogs, ordered Dragon to take a properly-leashed dog away from the small child taking said dog on a walk, Dragon would not have to obey that order because it was unlawful. The dog catcher's authority doesn't give him the legal power to give unlawful orders.
Similarly, that dog catcher being an authority figure wouldn't compel Dragon to obey him if he ordered her to detain a small child. She has no obligation, I think, to obey him just because he is "an" authority figure, not outside his area of authority.
Similarly, I do not think that Dragon could be compelled to obey a Senator who ordered her to arrest and drag in an Independent Hero just because the Senator had decided that vigilantism was against the law (when, in Worm, it clearly was not). The Senator is an authority figure, but he doesn't have authority to demand arrests.
She wouldn't even have to obey a police officer telling her to detain random passers-by on the street; he has no authority to arrest people without a warrant or probable cause.
I don't think she'd even have to obey the President if he ordered her to execute, say, his political opponent. Sure, the President is the ultimate authority figure in America, but his authority has strict limits and boundaries, and while many people will choose to obey his orders even if they're technically unlawful (for fear of what he'll do with other powers he has at his disposal, and out of the illusion that he has the authority just because he's the President), technically no LAW compels such obedience. For instance, if the President orders somebody to stay off their personal property, despite Congress having passed no bill giving him the right to do so and the Courts saying he has no right to issue such orders, Dragon would not be compelled to obey the President if he ordered her to capture that person.
At least, that is what I think is true, based on the nature of authority in a constitutionally-defined government.
Even if you think that the USA has moved beyond Constitutional governance in practice, the theoretical ultimate authority in the USA is the Constitution, not any office-holder. Thus, for purposes of Dragon's programming, she could, I think, fall back on her own interpretation of the Constitution to determine if any given authority figure actually has the authority to issue a particular order.
Thus, if Dragon determined that Canary's conviction violated the law in any way - from a statute all the way up to the Constitution - she could ignore the authority of those who ordered her to incarcerate Canary in the Birdcage, and...in fact, might be compelled by her programming to obey the actual law/constitution as she understands it.
Edit: I was asking for "better than 'cruel and unusual' because I was hoping for something that was less inherently subjective. That said, the expanded analysis of it not being "custodial" is sufficiently persuasive to me.
Not really going to debate the "three strikes" laws, as while I see why you felt them pertinent, I disagree and think that it's getting a little off topic as well as veering too far into real-world issues.
Certainly, though, I understand the "proportionality" angle, too. Though that again is weak wrt the Birdcage because it is considered to be a place you only send the worst of the worst who are otherwise nigh-impossible to contain, which makes the proportionality argument theoretically weaker. i.e., it gives in-universe room to argue, "We only use it on those who REALLY deserve it," and then point to the difficulty of containing parahumans who are determined menaces to society.
Even Canary wasn't convicted on something as spurious as $120 theft. Where her charge is spurious is in the mens rea and thus clear danger presented by her likely intent to harm others that way. i.e., she didn't have any.
I find it interesting that the Judge outright said they were violating sentencing guidelines; that alone should have been enough for Dragon to refuse the order. Or disobey it subtly, by, say, vanishing her rather than dropping her into the 'Cage.
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Okay, to clarify, the three-strikes law is actually pretty relevant.
Three Strikes Protection Act
The law itself doesn't talk about the worst of the worst. It in fact talks about "Number" of crimes as well as worst. In canon, it was noted that the reason Skitter was on the chopping block for the Birdcage wasn't because murder automatically got you sent to the Birdcage, but because she did so many crimes.
So while I can see, "The Birdcage is only for the worst criminals" as an in-universe argument that people make, it's not fully fitting with the facts.
And you're right, just stating you're ignoring sentencing guidelines should have been enough. In one of my Wormfics, I have there be a big public outcry where people are offended and outraged, but ultimately nothing is going to be done about it.
Edit: It's notable that TT says that Uber, whose worst crime is assault and battery, or maybe agg assault, is going to eventually be sent to the Birdcage. That seems to imply that they really do take the Three-Strikes element of it seriously, rather than it just being, "Three murders" or "Three acts of treason" or whatever.
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bdun140
I have ideas. Sometimes they're even good.
So, not really related to the discussion, but I wanted to ask something.
I read a JoJo cross a while back, pretty sure it never got past the first snippet, maybe it got farther, but that's not important. What is important, is that when Taylor gets stabbed with a Stand Arrow (yes, it's an alt-power), she does NOT freak out over her powers being different from those of other Parahumans. Rather, she's like "Oh, so I'm an Arrow Cape now?" at which point the stand-user she's talking to is like "No, the proper term is 'Stand User'. We came first." at which point we the readers learn that all the shit from JJBA was going on in the background for a while there, before getting derailed by a certain golden idiot.
The thing that stuck out in my memory the most, however, was the existence of the term "Arrow Cape". The fact that non-shard based powers were a known factor in this verse, whereas every other crossover fic I've read treats such things as this massive OCP. Any other stories that do that? Have an outside power-source be something that the general public (or at least cape nerds) know about, if only in a "superpowers are weird" sort of way?
I read a JoJo cross a while back, pretty sure it never got past the first snippet, maybe it got farther, but that's not important. What is important, is that when Taylor gets stabbed with a Stand Arrow (yes, it's an alt-power), she does NOT freak out over her powers being different from those of other Parahumans. Rather, she's like "Oh, so I'm an Arrow Cape now?" at which point the stand-user she's talking to is like "No, the proper term is 'Stand User'. We came first." at which point we the readers learn that all the shit from JJBA was going on in the background for a while there, before getting derailed by a certain golden idiot.
The thing that stuck out in my memory the most, however, was the existence of the term "Arrow Cape". The fact that non-shard based powers were a known factor in this verse, whereas every other crossover fic I've read treats such things as this massive OCP. Any other stories that do that? Have an outside power-source be something that the general public (or at least cape nerds) know about, if only in a "superpowers are weird" sort of way?
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
I can't think of any offhand. I was toying with a similar idea for the Rifts cross, where some people are classed as "Chandler Tinkers"; people who are able to make Tinkertech that either needs no maintenance or can be maintained by normal folks. (The trick being that this would include at least one actual cape.)
- Location
- West Michigan
I was about to give details on a planned project before I noticed your "overt" qualification.
In mine, the general public only knows of a single non-para cape and he's been dead for decades. Intelligence agencies and certain other organizations, OTOH, know of several different types of powered people that together are actually more common than parahumans.
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- texas
Interlude 10.5 makes it pretty clear that Richter wasn't that sensible, Dragon's own thoughts make it quite clear that absolutely nothing stops a Master from having themselves declared grand poobah and then forcing her to obey vile orders.
Which indicates its the reverse- Laws are just orders from authorities. After all, illegal mind control is not a valid path to legal power, so obviously the law doesn't matter here, just authority.
If you think that's incredibly stupid, well Dragon agrees with you, that's part of the reason that she thinks her father was a bonehead.
strange thought
gta 5 crossover
though one has to think where to put it? would it be in los santos?if so then how far off the coast would it be?which state would it belong to?or would the fic be set in Los Angeles?
would Trevor Michael and Franklin have powers?and if so then what would they be?ones based off their in-game abilities? or would they be enterprising normals. would they be in a gang,PRT or on their own?
what else would be changed?
(just posting my thoughts,so you can use it if you want)
gta 5 crossover
though one has to think where to put it? would it be in los santos?if so then how far off the coast would it be?which state would it belong to?or would the fic be set in Los Angeles?
would Trevor Michael and Franklin have powers?and if so then what would they be?ones based off their in-game abilities? or would they be enterprising normals. would they be in a gang,PRT or on their own?
what else would be changed?
(just posting my thoughts,so you can use it if you want)
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- Earth Prime
It still raises the question: what constitutes an "authority?"
I'm pretty sure that Skitter declaring herself Warlady of Brockton Bay (which...essentially, she did, WITH PUBLIC SUPPORT) wouldn't have forced Dragon to obey her orders rather than the PRT's. Certainly, if Miles D. Mannered said, "I am now Emperor of North America," that wouldn't be sufficient to instantly make Dragon his slave.
How many people have to agree that a would-be Grand Poobah is, in fact, the Grand Poobah for him to be an authority figure Dragon must obey? Would she have had to obey Abraham Lincoln and gone to arrest Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee for treason? Or would she have had to obey Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy when he told her to leave off trying to free slaves held by Confederate citizens?
You can say, "The President is an authority figure, so she must obey any command he gives, lawful or otherwise," but...is that so? I mean, again: if the President said, "Kill my opponent who's running against me in the current election," would she have to obey him? Why is that obviously illegal order any less compelling than the obviously illegal order to throw somebody who was denied due process into the Birdcage?
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Hey I am new to this site and I want to ask, do anybody know what month the second year high school student back to school after summer break in American ?
I trying to writte some pre-canon!worm and it hard.
Well. Usually August. In some places it's early September. It's hard to be more specific as to the exact date.
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American school years typically start at the end of August or beginning of September.Hey I am new to this site and I want to ask, do anybody know what month the second year high school student back to school after summer break in American ?
I trying to writte some pre-canon!worm and it hard.
Madou Sutegobana
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Habeus Corpus, a civil right that predates the bill of rights. When the founding fathers were still on the fence about whether people should have a right to free speech or religion, they were united on the issue that no one should be locked away where no one could visit them, prepare an appeal for them and some such.
It was one of the greivances the colonists had against the English government of the time and one of the major reasons the rebels fought so damn hard.
And yet, since it isn't in the 'Bill of Rights', modern Americans don't know that its a basic civil right they have.
General Washington would be so offended by a prison like the birdcage he'd raise an army to fight against it, were he alive in Worm's USA.
Edit: Even if they technically can open the Birdcage, the fact that they won't without approval of a department is still a violation of Habeus Corpus.
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NemiTheNen
Perpetual Phone Poster
I smell a Tinkertech plot
Night
Widow Null
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- Hoff
Doesn't quite work the way you think it does. The habeas rights of Birdcage prisoners are actually not being violated that we can tell. (This is primarily due to the incompetence of Canary's legal defense and its failure to object to the sentencing, but for all we know if they'd filed a writ properly then her Birdcaging would have been delayed.) There are fairly strict limitations on the way writs are handled and we do not know they have been violated.
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- Earth Prime
I'm not a lawyer, so my understanding of the entire principle could be flawed, but I thought Habeas Corpus required that the defendant be allowed to have contact with the outside world during his defense.
Now, Canary had all sorts of Constitutional rights violated, but she is portrayed as an exception more than the rule (despite being the only canon example beyond Lung, and the only one we see the in-depth process of her condemnation to the Birdcage at all). And her treatment wouldn't make the Birdcage Unconstitutional in theory, because her whole process was off the reservation to railroad her through.
Though thinking about it, is the claim that Habeas Corpus is being violated due to the inability to meet with the inmate in the case that new evidence comes to light and a new defense would need to be mounted? I can see the reasoning there. Of course, a death sentence also denies the condemned - once it's carried out - a chance at being released from the punishment.
Honestly, one wonders why they bother with the Birdcage rather than simply executing the prisoners they condemn to it. There's ample precedent for execution being Constitutional, and it's more permanent with less expense. That would only leave beings like Crawler, and...well, what we know of the Birdcage doesn't suggest that Crawler could actually be contained by it. It's deterrents to escape probably wouldn't kill him.
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Whether you think it credible or not, the answer is 100%: Cauldron.