The Justice System in Aetheri
backThe justice system in Aetheri (like a lot of other quirks of their society) revolves around the fact that around a third of spirits are truth seers, which means that there's a very solid chance that anyone you meet can tell instantly if you are knowingly lying to them. Truth seers are naturally overrepresented in law enforcement and law generally, but the (inborn, but requires development) skill is not absolutely required to work in these fields.
So where the justice systems we're familiar with on Earth start with the question of guilt, Aetheri's starts with the question of rehabilitation or punishment. Guilt is the easy part of solving a crime in Aetheri; the only real way to get away with a crime is to not end up on the investigator's radar at all, or to not be physically caught, because as soon as the right suspect is apprehended, it's not like they can lie their way out again. Torture is legal in interrogation contexts to compel a suspect to speak, since false confessions are not a concern; there's quite a bit of strict regulation around it, but as with any system, bad actors will do their best to find ways to around them.
The upside of such a high concentration of truth seers in the population is that law enforcement in Aetheri is generally more invested in getting to the truth of a case rather than carelessly pinning it on someone just to get a conviction, because such a case would disintegrate on contact with the rest of the system.
To start, a rundown of the different entities that make up the system:
- Elrymar Uma d'Escalus or the City Administrator: the name for the office responsible for overseeing most city aspects in Escalus (or in Ryvar, the Elryma Uma du Ryvar) as well as the title of the person who holds the top post. ('elrymar' = administrator/administration, context-dependent.) Functions like a mayoral office in a lot of respects. This position in Escalus is currently held by one of Numair's cousins and has been held by a d'Escala for centuries. They have certain direction over law enforcement as Numair mentions, but in matters any more specific than general policy regarding the street units, they defer to the local prosecutorial office (Treiha.)
- Elrymar Nycthar d'Escalus or the Escalan Investigative Bureau: the police department of Escalus, essentially. It functions mostly as you'd expect, although considerably less militarized than most of us are used to. Street units carry a qet, which is a particularly-made machete-like blade, as well as an object resembling a nightstick; obviously heavier weaponry exists in Aetheri, and some of it is stored in the Bureau's armory, but it's almost never needed. Detectives (also called investigators or hunters) are their own division and are generally unarmed, unless they're planning to confront a suspect outside a formal interrogation.
- Elrymar Seiqa d'Escalus or the Escalan Mediators' Office: Notably separate from law enforcement, these are the people who show up to mediate local disputes, break up minor fights, and respond to mental health crises. The office itself is also partly in charge of rehabilitation efforts within the justice system, which I'll get to.
- Aetherierri or the Aetherian National Army: about 10k strong. They rotate through rural areas and act in the capacity of the Investigative Bureau and the Mediators' Office wherever such a thing doesn't already exist. While on service they spend a lot of time doing things like running down livestock thieves and rooting out traffickers.
- Elrymar Treiha d'Escalus or the Office of the Treiha: This functions a lot like a district attorney's office; 'Treiha' can refer both to the office itself and the head of the office, as a title. The Treiha has authority over the detective division of law enforcement and works closely with them on solving cases; they then act as the prosecutor at trial, where instead of guilt the questions are A) how likely is someone to commit the same or a similar crime again, B) what a proportional punishment/course of rehabilitation is, and C) what is owed to the victims or their families. As the arm of the state, the Treiha typically argues for more severe sentences than their counterpart, the Nyhhdha.
- Elrymar Nyhhdha d'Escalus or just the Nyhhdha: This is sort of like a public defender's office, and the name translates to something like 'light hand.' Appropriately, their job is to argue for the perpetrator as to mitigating factors that the jury should take into account when deciding an appropriate sentence, to 'lighten' the hand of punishment. Such factors could include things like sudden passion, psychological issues, upbringing, etc. A not uncommon issue to run into is that, sometimes, no one in the Nyhhdha sees anything in a perpetrator's past or actions that they think is a mitigating factor, and they can't lie either, lest a jury realize they don't buy their own bullshit.
All that stated, let's go through the anatomy of a typical case passing through the system.
A crime is committed; let's say a bar fight goes bad, and by the time the dust settles someone is dead. Someone calls for help by running down to an emergency kiosk, which are present every ten blocks or so. They send brief info a flying note (literally, it looks like a paper airplane*) that homes in to the nearest precinct, which is staffed by both mediators and police street units, as well as usually a healer or two. Depending on what's in the note, they respond. In this case, someone's already dead, so there's no point in sending mediators. Street units show up to secure the scene and detain anyone who might have seen something; in this case, the crowd's already largely dispersed, the suspect long gone. Street units get people out of the obvious crime scene, ask anyone around if they can speak to what happened, and stand them around separately.
Detectives respond next to properly rope off the scene and talk to witnesses. Crime scenes are spelled in such a way to prevent entry unless you have a pass like the type you can see Vlad and the officers wearing on this page. (While those spells can be bypassed by a sufficiently skilled magic user, they're also seeded to alert detectives that they have been bypassed and retain a magical impression from the person who did the tampering, so it's obviously a bad idea to try.)
Questioning witnesses carries the same problem even for truth seers, which is that eyewitness testimony is actually pretty unreliable. Someone may be absolutely sure of what they saw, and therefore are not lying to a truth seer when they give information (whether or not something is seen as true is entirely based on if the person talking believes that it's true), but that information might be wrong all the same. At the same time, the suspect's buddy who couldn't scram in time wouldn't be able to lie to cover his ass. He could chance it, since detectives are not required to be truth seers and do not wear anything to indicate whether they are or not, but it's a risky chance to take.
Besides witnesses, there's a whole field of forensic magic that would be employed in any case. Most of the techniques involved are highly specialized, difficult, and aren't widely available for the public to learn. These include using small amounts of blood or other biological evidence to essentially dowse for a suspect; spelling an item that was heavily used by a suspect to track them (really only works with something that the suspect carried on them for a long time); and magical impressions, which is a technique that posits that everyone has a unique sort of magical fingerprint (though it works more like wine tasting than fingerprinting, meaning it's not remotely objective.) They also can utilize fingerprinting, though as Escalus' population becomes more diverse species-wise this isn't always useful anymore.
Say that in this case, they get lucky and one of those witnesses is in fact the suspect's buddy.
* Of course they're not modeled after airplanes specifically, but instead a very narrow type of ray that lives in the river. In paper form the effect is the same.