Legal opinions?

[ffutures]

Here's a few paragraphs from the time travel thing describing its use in law enforcement. Comments on the legalities would be appreciated.

Police use of Time Ships is reserved for the most serious offences; murder, treason, and the like. Since 1895 Scotland Yard has had a Temporal Crimes Bureau, set up to help police from the future. Typically a small group of officers land discreetly, identify themselves at the Bureau, then make their way to the crime scene with "local" help. They lay in wait for the criminal, interrupt the crime, and identify the criminal. If possible they will prevent the crime; even though changes in the events of the past don't change the present, it's not in the nature of most officers to let someone get away with a serious crime. In murder cases if the victim survives he or she may be asked to come forward to the present to give evidence in the case. In all cases criminals are left in their own time, since it would be futile to punish them when the past does not affect the present. On return to the present the "real" criminal is arrested and charged, and all of the evidence gathered in the past (including the statements of victims etc.) used to obtain a conviction.

On a few occasions this technique has failed; criminals aware that they might be caught by these means have prepared elaborate deceptions in which someone else appears to commit the crime, or obscured the date and location of the crime so thoroughly that they could not be traced. Fortunately few criminals are bright enough for this. In one case the victim actually lied to protect the murderer, despite seeing photographs of her own body. She was murdered again two months later, but this time the murderer was found guilty without the need for time travel.

The legal implications of this method are a minefield. One defense - that a crime has not been convicted because it was prevented in the past - has already been eliminated by the Law Lords, in a landmark case which established that events as perceived in the present must be the only criterion, with any tampering in the past irrelevant. Questions of inheritance etc. are still determined on a case by case basis, and there have been some contradictory judgements. In general anyone brought forward to replace a deceased version of themselves is assumed to be the deceased person for purposes of inheritance. Unfortunately this has occasionally been combined with a lengthy delay between death and "resurrection", with the victim's estate passed on to his or her heirs, and no clearly established route for recovering it. In several cases (typically of spouses) a murder victim has gone on to inherit the murderer's estate. A government commission of enquiry is looking into these cases, as a prelude to drafting new legislation, but nobody is holding their breath waiting for a result...

Comments

[dungeoneer.livejournal.com]

Quick question, although this is more about technical stuff than the law: how do police from the future identify themselves to police from the past? Would some kind of name / rank / district / era be needed? The Temporal Crimes Bureau would need some pretty authoritative records and means of verifying identification otherwise they'd be forced to rely on the judgement of the individual officer when allowing visiting coppers.

Of course, as I'm sure you may have considered, therein lies a scenario -- criminals imitating policemen, travelling back to the past and exploiting an age where the police are less technologically advanced...

Actually, let's get back on topic. How do the Temporal Crimes Bureau handle jaunts into the future? Do the future police departments allow police from the present the right of hot pursuit? I'd assume police from the present, after collaring their criminals, would have to undergo a full debriefing, contamination and inventory check just so they don't bring back any technology, souvenirs or diseases.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

how do police from the future identify themselves to police from the past?
Typically they know the police in the past - we're talking a few days or weeks here, not hundreds of years.

therein lies a scenario -- criminals imitating policemen, travelling back to the past and exploiting an age where the police are less technologically advanced

It probably happens. For reasons that are inextricably tied in to the way that time travel works in this setting, there is no way to know.

How do the Temporal Crimes Bureau handle jaunts into the future?

You can't travel beyond your native time unless someone else yanks you into the present (your future), at which point you become a native of the present. The past disappears as soon as you get back to your own time. Completely. As in you can go back and meet someone for the first time a dozen times, kill your own grandad repeatedly, etc. But a gentleman wouldn't, of course.

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff, Marcus. A good lawyer would be able to tie this in knots though. If changes in the past don't propagate into the future, then there's considerable evidence that any past that officers are visiting isn't the actual past, merely a divergent reality. In that case, it could be argued that persons in the present couldn't be found guilty of crimes committed by their divergent selves, and that persons "saved" from murder in the past couldn't inherit because they aren't the same person. Surviving victims of murder should at best be used to testify, then sent back in time to continue their life as normal (after all, there's no need for them to inherit in their past, since they didn't die there). There's no logical reason for them to remain in the future, or to be taken there in the first place if physics prevents them from going back.

The danger of the Law Lords ruling is that it effectively states that what actually happened doesn't matter, only how it looks from the future.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - those are very good points, I can see I'll have to rewrite that a bit.