What was the Female SS's Sentence?

[Myasishchev]

I mean, if criminality is categorically defined as an illness, why have trials? It's fairly irrelevant what the patient has done or not done, and the treatment is unlikely to do him or her any harm even if applied without cause. And the "with/without cause" question is something only medical experts can answer - people enforcing or interpreting law would be badly out of their depth there.

Surely depriving an innocent (or "healthy?") person of his freedom for 6 months is punishment in and of itself, even if the corrective treatment is not harmful. You would at least need to prove that the illness exists before forcing an individual to undergo treatment.

I think you would still need courts in some form, to determine if the "symptom" had manifested itself.

Not a trial, because trials adjudicate guilt or liability, but yeah, I'm sure even the Feds need some kind of judicial proceeding to determine the involuntary confinement of a citizen. I simply don't see any free society without some kind of prohibition on deprivation of liberty without due process of law, even if the deprivation is medical in nature.

It's not "attempted genocide". It's genocide. If you're referring to the fact that she didn't manage to kill all Cardassians, well, nobody in the recent history has managed to kill all members of a particular ethnic/national/religious group, but that doesn't mean they aren't guilty of the crime of genocide.

Well, it was Garak, who managed to kill nobody, and insofar as genocide has elements I think someone still has to die. So I guess it's just attempted murder?

Edit: actually, on reflection, I can really only assume that Garak must have been charged solely with screwing around as a civilian in a restricted area, and not with the quantum torpedo thing.

But reading on, I see you have wondered about that as well...

Yeah. Although we've never really seen much of the Federation's mainstream judicial system. We've seen Starfleet's procedures, which are laughably informal and just absolutely impossible to take too seriously if you know just a bit about law or legal ethics. I mean, I truly hope that civilian justice in the Federation is not meted out with such travesties of justice as the proceedings in "Measure of a Man." That thing is just... not even wrong. Oh, and not they need apply to the future, but it's hilarious to watch the proceeding with the current Federal Rules of Evidence in mind and just see the twenty or thirty things that the completely untrained "attorneys" would be laughed out of any real courtroom for.

Apropos of nothing, I also like to think that civilian judges look like Q from Farpoint.

 

[Photon]

Not every criminal needs to go to a "mental health facility". Is that a euphemism for brain washing factory?


As for the female Founder... it wouldn't make any sense to punish her. "Solids" punishing the "Founder", that would only confirm every prejudice the shape shifters have against them.

Bullshit

 

[Nightdiamond]

If it were the other way around, the Dominion (or Cardassians) would not be as forgiving...

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

In the relaunch novels she's being held in a Maximum Security Prison.

This. She got life, with parole hearings every 50 years.

Do they go into any detail as to exactly how maximum it is? How the prison keeps her from escaping (or using her shape shifting to imitate someone and sneak out)? And what, to a Founder, is a life sentence?

 

[JarodRussell]

Not every criminal needs to go to a "mental health facility". Is that a euphemism for brain washing factory?


As for the female Founder... it wouldn't make any sense to punish her. "Solids" punishing the "Founder", that would only confirm every prejudice the shape shifters have against them.

Bullshit

Perfect post. You win the Internet.

 

[happydave]

In the relaunch novels she's being held in a Maximum Security Prison.

This. She got life, with parole hearings every 50 years.

Do they go into any detail as to exactly how maximum it is? How the prison keeps her from escaping (or using her shape shifting to imitate someone and sneak out)? And what, to a Founder, is a life sentence?

Just looked it up then (Worlds of DS9: Book 3. Page 238)

The founder pled guilty and was given life. It states they'll revisit the judgement every 50 years (rather than parole hearings) as the Federation isn't sure how long 'life' is for a Founder. The founder also admitted that she had already lived 700 years.

The jail itself has into a bit of a backstory as how it was refit, which is a fair few paragraphs. And then as they go through it later they describe a few of the security measures and that she's the only prisoner on the entire world as it's special just for her.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Female Shapeshifter reminded me of harsh old Catholic nuns who taught school who would crack you on the knuckles with her ruler. Old, bitter, very racist. Someone that was expected to be catered to. Makes you wonder if the Great Link sent this being out just to be rid of her.

Why would it be a her anyway? How did Odo and her have sex? How would she know how it felt if she did not have a frame of reference (for example, I don't understand fish mating, and making myself a fish is not going to answer my question.)

I really enjoyed that character a lot, one of the best villians in the Trek Universe. She was a bitch and she was evil and her character should have been killed painfully somehow in the end.

 

[Myasishchev]

Why would it be a her anyway? How did Odo and her have sex? How would she know how it felt if she did not have a frame of reference (for example, I don't understand fish mating, and making myself a fish is not going to answer my question.)

I'd suspect most Trek fans actually have a pretty good idea of how many fish release their genetic material--without the touch of a female.

Just kidding. In seriousness, if you could faithfully reproduce the biological machinery of a fish and somehow record its existence in your own experiential memory, you'd probably be able to understand fish sex (and swimming, and so forth). Whatever actually forms the physical substrate of the changelings' consciousness, it's apparently not the matter they forge into copies of humanoids or birds or fireballs, yet they appear able to record the experiences of that matter (which, as perfect copies, should be identical to any real humanoid, bird, or fireball) on whatever substrate gives rise to the consciousness.

On the other hand, non-living systems, and indeed systems without advanced nervous systems, should not really report back experience. I mean, "to be a rock," or to be a fireball, is, as far as I know (I'm not a changeling) to not process any information whatsoever in an experiential way. It might be interesting in other regards, since the consciousness exists independently and can study the physical properties of the rock form or fireball form at leisure, but it's not learning what rocks or fireballs feel, because they don't. Of course, being able to form such objects proves that the changelings' intelligence is externally located, somewhere very much else, because if they are merely the object that they take the form of, then "to be a rock" should be "to be quite dead," since no instruction, memory, or consciousness can persist in a big, undifferentiated slab of silicon dioxide.

What's really interesting is that humans are self-aware physical systems, yet changelings take humanoid forms all the time. Any duplicate of, say, Julian Bashir--at least one sufficient to fool routine scans and take part in normal conversation--will be a sapient life form in its own right. So what is the relationship of the changeling--whose own consciousness must be external to the physical object it controls because it can form objects without the neurological machinery to support any consciousness--to the meat puppet which has its own intrinsic thoughts and feelings?

 

[Timo]

...No doubt a Changeling could and would create imperfect lifeforms if those better suited their needs than perfect ones. I would be surprised if it weren't taboo for them to truly become Solids, with all the associated Solid thinking processes. Let's remember how they used "truly becoming Solid" as a form of punishment for Odo!

Which is doubly ironic in that not only would that sort of treatment imposed on the Link itself have helped the Link in understanding Solid thinking and perhaps avoiding future wars (so much better to replace them with psychologically optimized manipulation!) - the treatment would probably also have cured the Link of the Section 31 disease! Or at least it would have put the symptoms on indefinite hold, as it apparently did on Odo.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kai Winn]

might have kicked her out an airlock. since founders need no oxygen or anything else to breathe, and no energy supply of any sort, and are also immune against the cold of space, she's pobably floating somewhere in the alpha quadrant. unless she shapeshifted into a warp capable vessel and returned to the great link.

Um, what would the point of a law system if the punishment were to release a convicted criminal, so they could do whatever they like all over again? It's the point of the penal law to protect the society and stop the criminal from committing crimes again?

what do you want to do with her? you can imprison her in an iron-clad bucket of the sort odo spent some time in in 'invasive procedures', or surrounded by force fields all the time, hoping no black-out occurs. certainly a cruel and unusual punishment according to federation standards. i'm not even sure that storage good enough for the shapeshifting-challenged odo would suffice, laas could turn into mist (and a warp-capable space octopus). who knows what the female can turn into, maybe subatomic particles that pass trough anything. or tachyon radiation, ruining the timeline.

 

[Kai Winn]

talking about that laas, how did he enter the shuttle in open space, anyway? it's not so that the thingis have vents to let fresh air in, what they have are structural integrity fields. force fields turned on all the time.

 

[Nightdiamond]

What if they turned her over to the new Cardassian Govrnment-assuming they ever rebuild one...

I recall both the Federation and the Obsidian Order created devices that could prevent (theoretically) a changeling from changing shape-but that would fall under cruel punishment most likely.

 

[DevilEyes]

might have kicked her out an airlock. since founders need no oxygen or anything else to breathe, and no energy supply of any sort, and are also immune against the cold of space, she's pobably floating somewhere in the alpha quadrant. unless she shapeshifted into a warp capable vessel and returned to the great link.

Um, what would the point of a law system if the punishment were to release a convicted criminal, so they could do whatever they like all over again? It's the point of the penal law to protect the society and stop the criminal from committing crimes again?

what do you want to do with her? you can imprison her in an iron-clad bucket of the sort odo spent some time in in 'invasive procedures', or surrounded by force fields all the time, hoping no black-out occurs. certainly a cruel and unusual punishment according to federation standards. i'm not even sure that storage good enough for the shapeshifting-challenged odo would suffice, laas could turn into mist (and a warp-capable space octopus). who knows what the female can turn into, maybe subatomic particles that pass trough anything. or tachyon radiation, ruining the timeline.

What would you do? Let her go? Let her go anywhere she wishes, including returning to the Great Link? What's the point of a penal system if you don't even isolate the perpetrators so they couldn't go on committing crimes? If there is no punishment involved in it, how does it even fulfill the purpose of deterring people from committing crimes?

 

[Kai Winn]

i don't see bush facing a tribunal, so why should a fictional character? until now i pointed out how difficult it is to detain her, but to present evidence that she committed 'war-crimes' is an even greater problem. thanks to garak who once more didn't manage to control himself the last witnesses that she personally ordered anything are dead. the only war crime she comitted was against cardassia, and that's not the federation's jurisdiction. hand her over to the cardassians, they execute. for that matter, garak deserves the same punishment.
then she can plead a lot of stuff, how about insanity due to section 31's plague? i don't think the federation want to make its actions public. or she can claim she doesn't have an independent mind but was remote controlled by the great link. then there are the difficulties of who started the war. the federation invaded their territory, alpha quadrant species started to colonize worlds there. cardassia and romulus tried to wipe the founders out. the klingons invaded cardassia, and it had every right to join the dominion for protection which the federation did not deliver. gowron was the ceo, not shapeshifter martok. the federation mined the wormhole, and this act was the start of the open federation/dominion war.

 

[Timo]

talking about that laas, how did he enter the shuttle in open space, anyway? it's not so that the thingis have vents to let fresh air in, what they have are structural integrity fields. force fields turned on all the time.

Well, like Prof. Farnsworth once pointed out, spacecraft are generally built to cope with exactly one atmosphere of pressure difference, with the pressure inside and the lack thereof outside. Trek spacecraft are supposed to operate within atmospheres, so they might have been built to cope with a few bars' worth of external pressure, too - but I don't see why Starfleet would hesitate to build components that yield to a slightly greater external pressure, say, a few hundred atmospheres. There'd be many utilities for components that allow inside air to leak outside in controlled amounts, and said devices might be among those that won't stop outside gases from forcing their way inside. Unless specifically blocked by a solid shutter, that is, but this would defy the purpose of the component so the shutter would probably be open most of the time.

What's the point of a penal system if you don't even isolate the perpetrators so they couldn't go on committing crimes?

Apparently, no such system exists in the 24th century Federation. Or the 23rd century one, even. Criminals walk into institutions, then walk out reformed, and isolation is only involved in the criminals are of the rare subtype that takes a long time to reform.

Yet even this futuristic system has a provision for those who cannot be cured within a predictable timespan: there is an isolation facility where the nearly incurable can be cured in peace, and in the meantime restrained from doing harm. So if the FF were considered a criminal, I'd expect her to undergo therapy in an open facility at first, then perhaps be sent to Elba II for further treatment if standard methods weren't effective, and then perhaps kept there forever and then some (since non-reformed people apparently don't get out).

If, however, the FF were convicted on some other basis than her being considered a criminal (and thus mentally ill) - say, in a political gesture, perhaps as a hostage against further Dominion mischief - then I'd expect the UFP to readily improvise other solutions. In no case would I see any "deterrence" value in the UFP treating the FF harshly and punitively; that would merely enrage the Dominion further, thus significantly encouraging future crime.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DevilEyes]

i don't see bush facing a tribunal, so why should a fictional character?

Relevance?

until now i pointed out how difficult it is to detain her, but to present evidence that she committed 'war-crimes' is an even greater problem. thanks to garak who once more didn't manage to control himself the last witnesses that she personally ordered anything are dead. the only war crime she comitted was against cardassia, and that's not the federation's jurisdiction. hand her over to the cardassians, they execute. for that matter, garak deserves the same punishment.
then she can plead a lot of stuff, how about insanity due to section 31's plague? i don't think the federation want to make its actions public. or she can claim she doesn't have an independent mind but was remote controlled by the great link. then there are the difficulties of who started the war. the federation invaded their territory, alpha quadrant species started to colonize worlds there. cardassia and romulus tried to wipe the founders out. the klingons invaded cardassia, and it had every right to join the dominion for protection which the federation did not deliver. gowron was the ceo, not shapeshifter martok. the federation mined the wormhole, and this act was the start of the open federation/dominion war.

There, that's the kind of stuff her defense could state. At the trial. You do realize that there has to be a trial? And that there has to be a sentence is she is found guilty?

What's the point of a penal system if you don't even isolate the perpetrators so they couldn't go on committing crimes?

Apparently, no such system exists in the 24th century Federation. Or the 23rd century one, even. Criminals walk into institutions, then walk out reformed, and isolation is only involved in the criminals are of the rare subtype that takes a long time to reform.

Obviously, it does exist. Or else criminals would be left to try to go on committing crimes*, unless they decide to check into an institution voluntarily. If they are obliged to undergo "reformation" in an institution as their sentence, then Federation obviously does have a penal system. (And depending on what the "reformation" is like, it might be less pleasant than the old-style incarceration.)

And did Tom Paris go to prison out of his own free will? Speaking of which, what about his 30 days in the brig on Voyager? How come Starfleet has a penal system, if the Federation doesn't?

*in which case... let's be honest, the crime rates would be insane.

 

[Photon]

i don't see bush facing a tribunal, so why should a fictional character?

Good Lord, build a bridge and get over it

 

[Kai Winn]

Trek spacecraft are supposed to operate within atmospheres, so they might have been built to cope with a few bars' worth of external pressure, too - but I don't see why Starfleet would hesitate to build components that yield to a slightly greater external pressure, say, a few hundred atmospheres.
Timo Saloniemi

how deep did paris take the delta flyer on that water world, 500 km? that's 50,000 atm.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

the only war crime she comitted was against cardassia, and that's not the federation's jurisdiction.

Why not?

Cardassia ultimately rejected its association with the Dominion (thanks to Damar) and allied itself with the Federation. That *made* it the Federation's jurisdiction when the Dominion laid waste to Cardassia.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

the only war crime she comitted was against cardassia, and that's not the federation's jurisdiction.

Why not?

Cardassia ultimately rejected its association with the Dominion (thanks to Damar) and allied itself with the Federation. That *made* it the Federation's jurisdiction when the Dominion laid waste to Cardassia.

I'll go with the WWII analogy. Nazi Germany didn't commit any war crimes against the United States either. Yet the United States participated in the Nuremberg trials.

Anyway, I guess the Female Shapeshifter preferred to be judged by the Federation rather than by the Cardassians. Maybe it was even a condition of the Dominion surrender.