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stillness-in-green · 4 years ago

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Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Two)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

Introduction and Part One

PART TWO: Logistics Problems

The Initial Arrests

Looking over the events above, one thing becomes apparent almost immediately: the only one that involves numbers even resembling those at the villa are the Rice Riots, and arrests there were scattered across two months. The only thing I could find that even came close to the idea of arresting the entire PLF in a day was a mass detainment in India in 2011: in the run-up to a separatist rally[7] that had stated its intention to be a “Million Man March,” police reportedly detained 100,000 people to stop them from attending. To do this, they used auditoriums and stadiums, not actual detention facilities.

And you can see why! We see a few pictures of the Gunga Villa group in the aftermath, but they’re pictures that raise more questions than they answer. Consider this one:

The detainment and relocation of the PLF. (Chapter 296)

This is but the tiniest fraction of the people captured, but every single one of them has had their hands and arms bound. The ones we see in the basement are restrained similarly. Where did all those restraints come from? Who got them all here? Were they, perhaps, made by the man in the center, who conspicuously has lengths of the same restraint wrapped around his wrists? If so, how did he make them all so freely, when most similar quirks we see rely on a certain amount of body mass or caloric intake?

Or take those transports in the background. How many people can each hold, and how long will it take to move a group of 17,000 into secure facilities? How are those 17,000 being kept docile all that time, especially once they’ve been moved onto the transports? Will there be a hero onboard every one, making sure the prisoners don’t get the opportunity to plan amongst themselves? Were there similar transports parked at every other raid site across the rest of the country? Enough of them and their assigned heroes to move the other 98,000 people?

Consider what we know about the Paranormal Liberation Front.[8] While easiest to compare numerically to widespread protest movements, they’re unlike any historical mass arrest in that context because they are, every one of them, combat-trained and ready to give their lives for the cause. There's no one there to tell them all to stand down, at least not that we see give such an order. Trumpet, perhaps, could have, but why would he have done so? Re-Destro gave the order back in Deika, but Re-Destro seems to have lost consciousness following his battle with Edgeshot, and I much doubt he’d have given the same order here as he did when facing Shigaraki in any case.

My Hero Academia has a long history of treating police custody as something like a status effect, like once a villain has been subdued, they’re In Custody, and magically become incapable of attempting to mount an escape. But why should this be so? There’s a relatively common misconception I see in fanfic that the police have “quirk cancellation restraints,” but let’s be clear: no such device exists in the series. This is the ostensible reason All For One and Muscular are restrained so unforgivingly; it’s why the prisoners in Tartarus have guns pointed at their heads at all times. It’s why Overhaul’s drug was such a big deal and it’s why the only way to stop Gigantomachia was to drug him or have Best Jeanist bind him in steel cables.

There is no way to stop someone in MHA from using their quirk except convincing them not to, via diplomacy or intimidation, or rendering them unconscious. Which of those tactics, pray tell, is in use here, such that the enormous numbers of people at issue remain subdued until they can be moved to secure facilities?

The Liberated Districts

Another problem quickly presents itself. We’re told that the PLF’s “other bases” around the country were hit, but we weren’t shown what that looked like. We saw Slidin’ Go and another hero in a prisoner transport; we know from bonus material that people like Class 1-B and Mirio—and presumably any number of other high school hero interns from around the country—were involved in those other raids. Still, we didn’t see what those base raids actually entailed.

That’s not surprising, because “base” is not really a very accurate word to describe the scale of the problem. See, with the intention of the raids being to put a stop to the PLF in one fell swoop, rather than risk a drawn-out conflict with a force that Hawks describes as, “On par with, maybe even greater than,” the power of their hero-saturated society, the Commission would have had to take into account an aspect of the MLA that readers learned about during My Villain Academia: what Trumpet calls “liberated districts.”

Deika was a liberated district—an entire town where an enormous chunk of the population was made up of members of the MLA. Ominously, the fact that Trumpet had a ready term to describe it—“a” liberated district, not “our” liberated district, or even “the first” liberated district—suggests that Deika was not the only one.[9] Further, Curious describes what we can expect the heroes would have to contend with in such areas: people who look like everyday civilians but are actually combat-trained warriors. Combat-trained warriors not gathered in one conveniently isolated compound or solitary building, but scattered across miles of homes and businesses, schools and parks, anywhere that an ordinary person might be found spending their day.

That is an entirely different can of worms than raiding one single building; thus it is here that the logistics really start to strain. Mass arrests of a civilian populace don't work at all the same way as a round-up of people all in a single area—how do you arrest an entire town? Well, there is such a thing as martial law, or military occupation, and maybe those tactics would work if the PLF had sent all their ace combatants to the villa and all the people remaining in the target city were terrified and unarmed civilians who could be ordered to keep inside their houses until further notice lest they start getting shot. That is not at all how the bulk of the PLF—that is, the ranks of the MLA—have been portrayed, though.[10] Again, Re-Destro and Curious characterize their 116,000 warriors as all being trained, combat-ready, prepared to rise up to answer the call. That is not a population that you're going to keep cowed with a certain minimum police presence, especially as time drags on.

Anyway, an occupation is clearly out-of-keeping with how the text presents the operation being run. We’re given no reason to assume other raids were any different than the ones we saw: a team of heroes launches a coordinated assault with a backline set up to catch stragglers. We’re told, after all, that the other sympathizers were “rounded up,” so extended detainment-in-place clearly wasn’t the intention. That just returns us to the problem, though.

According to Trumpet, Deika was 90% MLA. Presumably it was one of their higher-concentration bases, yes, but the situation isn’t any simpler in places that are “only” e.g. 80%, 70%, 60% inducted. It only becomes complicated in different ways.

Imagine a 70% liberated district. PLF-adherents are in the government, the municipal operations, the schools, the stores. How does this town keep running in a state of mass arrest? If the 70% are removed, what are the other 30% to do? Is the town even livable in that state? Will the remainder have to relocate? Can they afford that, and if not, what measures will be taken to help them? How quickly can those measures be enacted?[11]

The liberated districts present a bevy of other problems, too, but we’ll come back to those in Part Three.

Detainment Facilities

Let’s look at some more real-world facts and numbers.

As of 2018, Japan had 184 penal institutions, a term which covers prisons, detention houses, and juvenile facilities of either type. There are 70 prisons, 108 detention houses (eight of which are major facilities; the rest smaller branch locations), and 6 juvenile facilities. Their official capacity—that is, the number of occupants they are considered able to house without becoming overcrowded—is roughly 89,000. Their current population is around 48,000.

This puts Japan’s prison density—how close they are to being at full capacity—at 54%. They could not even double their occupancy without becoming overcrowded. Looking back to our PLF numbers, this tells us that real-life Japan could take an influx of 17,000. They absolutely could not take an influx of 115,000.

Here’s another way to look at it: in Japan currently, the rate of incarceration is 38 people per 100,000, in a population of 126 million. Adding the PLF to those numbers would mean they're incarcerating 130 per 100,000—more than triple the amount.

There’s another problem on top of the capacity issue: in Japan, penal institutions are divided up by what kind of prisoner they’re intended to house. Remand prisoners—that is, pre-trial detainees—are to be housed in different facilities than convicted prisoners. Convicted prisoners are sorted further by demographic traits, the type of offense they’ve committed, whether or not it was their first offense, and so on. For example, there’s an entire prison in Chiba Prefecture dedicated to housing men convicted of traffic violations; elsewhere, even murderers are subdivided according to criminal affiliation and likelihood of reoffending.

The relevance here is obvious. The problem isn't merely that there is limited prison capacity, but that that capacity is further limited by what space is available in the correct type of prison. And I am very prepared to bet that All For One prioritized targeting prisons that held violent offenders; he even implies as much when he describes the people he freed as violent escapees.

Speaking of All For One’s prison breaks, let’s take a look at some canonical numbers. They offer both information that mitigates the problems above, but also present new reasons to be concerned.

All For One, the night of his escape from Tartarus, targets seven other prisons, managing to free at least some inmates from six of them. Including the Tartarus escapees, 10,000 convicts are freed.

10,000 from seven prisons. Consider again the numbers above: Japan currently houses less than five times that many in twenty-six times as many penal institutions. In general, prisons don’t hold anywhere near those numbers—the largest one in Japan houses just barely over 2,000; even one that houses 500 is considered to be a large inmate population.[12]

I did some math based on the numbers I had available, and my rough estimate is that, in Japan, about 88% of the carceral population—42,000 people—are housed in the for-real prisons; the other 12% are remand prisoners and a negligible percent are incarcerated minors.

The MHA numbers are wildly, wildly higher. Now, this makes sense. In this post by @codenamesazanka, she notes that the first My Hero Academia movie describes Japan’s crime rate as a somewhat vaguely defined 6%, and estimates that this means the crime rate in MHA’s Japan is seven times higher than in real life—and that this is drastically lower than anywhere else in the world thanks solely to All Might! In other parts of the world, the crime rate is over 20% at minimum. So it seems reasonable to assume that Japan’s carceral capacity has increased likewise. Not, I think, to the degree that they automatically have the prison space to match their crime rate, but certainly more space than in real life.

Assuming, then, that MHA’s Japan has far more and/or far larger prison facilities, that also means they must need that kind of space—which means the space is already in use. Which, again, takes us back to the problem of overcrowding. If not—if the country is easily capable of dumping 115,000 people in prison without even causing a ripple of difficulty—then that implies its own deeply harrowing things about the rate of incarceration in the country. Either way, it sounds like a country that badly, badly needs to find a better way of doing things.

Legal Proceedings

Here’s another issue to consider: the legal proceedings. See, Edgeshot says this:

The hero Edgeshot explains why protecting the country requires these sixteen-year-olds be on the frontlines in a fight with people absolutely ready to kill them. Words cannot describe how much I wanted Re-Destro to knot this guy around a tree. (Chapter 263)

“If any of them get out, they could keep terrorizing other places.”

So assume for a moment that everything went exactly according to plan. Virtually all 115,000 members of the Liberation Front got rounded up, there’s easily enough room for them in Japan’s correctional facilities, and now the entire organization is awaiting trial. What happens next?

The Judicial Process

To provide some context for those of my readers whose only exposure to the judicial process is pop culture depictions, the very first thing that should happen after a person is arrested in the U.S. is a pre-trial appearance, at which people are formally told what the charges against them are and bail is set or denied. Non-violent offenders, provided they have someone able to post bail, are usually able to await their trial date at home, albeit under travel restrictions. Typically this pre-trial hearing should be within two business days; if a detainee hasn’t seen a judge in that time, the prosecutors’ office is obligated to let them go.[13] This doesn’t necessarily mean the person is off the hook entirely, of course; they can be arrested again later. It just means they’re free to go for the time being.

I don’t think for one second that Japan’s legal system can handle processing an influx the size of the PLF in just a few days. For comparison’s sake, in 2018 (the same year all my incarceration numbers come from, incidentally), 206,000 people were arrested in total, for the whole year. So will the overflow just be let go? Released to their homes to wait for the police to come back when they have more time? Yet that doesn’t seem to track with how Edgeshot was talking, does it?

On the one hand, if you look at the numbers from some of my historical analogues, it’s very consistent that only a small portion of people swept up in mass arrests in Japan ever actually reach trial. For the Rice Riots and the March 15 Incident, that portion is about a third—quite sizeable, given the numbers involved—but the others are lower still: the long-term arrests under the Peace Preservation Laws saw only about a twelfth of those arrested actually brought to trial; for the Righteous Army, it was less than a tenth.

Frankly, you don't arrest those kinds of numbers and then actually prosecute all of them; you arrest them to scare the shit out of people, and then you try the ringleaders and whichever others you have the most dirt on. This is the pattern in every other instance that involves over a thousand people being arrested.

On the other hand, even setting aside the fact that people can apparently be dropped in Tartarus without trial now,[14] a significant difference between the U.S. and Japan is that pretrial detention can stretch on and on and on in Japan. Legally speaking, charges should be filed with 72 hours, but prosecutors can request ten more days twice, then repeat the process over by adding other potential charges about which they need to question the suspect. So, yes, I suppose that, if the authorities do have the facilities to keep the PLF in, there’s nothing stopping them from dragging this detainment out indefinitely—it just isn’t very in-keeping with the historical record to do so with all of them.

As you might expect, lengthy detainments are a massively controversial aspect of the Japanese legal system to human rights activists both locally and abroad, since the loophole of detainees not yet having been charged or tried allows police to get around a lot of the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed, particularly the right to legal representation.[15]

So, now that I’ve brought up the right to legal counsel, here’s another procedural issue: due to a generally non-litigious culture and a very difficult bar exam, there's a dearth of attorneys in Japan. Defense attorneys have a particularly hard time; thanks to the presumption of guilt of those arrested by police, and an oft-vicious ostracization of criminals, it's seen as something of a blemish on one's character to willingly defend the accused, so defense lawyers are frequently unpopular and underpaid. I have to assume MHA is facing similar problems.[16] Good luck finding all the people you need to investigate and defend the new glut of people in the system, though!

No, the reason real-life Japan’s legal system can go on functioning even with a shortage of lawyers is, I suspect, that compared to how long pre-trial detention can go on, trials are fairly quick. Legally, they're required to last no longer than a few weeks. There is, however, concern among some in the legal profession that cases are not being examined closely enough, leading to preventable errors and miscarriages of justice,[17] due to both the haste with which trials are conducted and aspects of Japan's “lay judge” system.

Lay judges are a unique feature of Japan's legal system, in some ways similar to—and in other ways very distinct from—a jury of one’s peers. As in a U.S. jury, lay judges are a panel randomly selected from the citizenry to hear evidence and render judgement. However, where jurists are a passive audience to the presentation of the case, only debating the merits behind closed doors after the case concludes, lay judges are encouraged to take active part in the trial process, empowered to question witnesses and challenge evidence. The lay judges are joined by a smaller number of professional judges; a verdict requires a majority vote of the judges' panel, in which at least one vote is that of said professional judges.

As to what this has to do with concerns about justice, consider, if you will, how the requirements of a system that demands active involvement from its participants might intersect with the (self-)perception of the Japanese people as modest and not wanting to “make trouble” for others, particularly when combined with a widespread belief that suspects would not be brought to trial if they weren’t guilty. Additionally, in the specific context of My Hero Academia, consider how bias about villains or “villainous quirks” will influence such judgements.

I’ll talk more about the presupposition of guilt in Japan and how it relates to the treatment of suspects by both officials and the public in Part Three, but for now, let’s consider the trial itself. What will the charges be? What will the sentences be? How long will the PLF members be in prison? And will that time in prison do the slightest thing to prevent them from going right back to what they were doing when they get out? Are they just going to be imprisoned indefinitely? Until they say they change their minds?

When I began my research, there were two main things I wanted to examine in regard to crimes the PLF at large might be on the hook for: membership in an illegal organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism.

Japan and Illegal Organizations

So here’s the thing: Japan doesn’t criminalize membership in organizations categorically. Because of the government’s history abusing laws to crack down on labor organizations and political dissent—e.g. the March 15 Incident—any attempts to legislate the process of banning criminal organizations get significant pushback from freedom of speech advocates. After all, critics say, the police may say that your community activist group doesn’t count as a terrorist organization now, but what’s actually stopping them from categorizing it as such in the future?

Now, that’s not to say Japan doesn’t have ways to regulate such groups at all! I’ll talk more about this later on, but briefly, groups that are found likely to be advocating for “terroristic subversive activity” can be forcibly barred from e.g. printing their organizational material, holding public assemblies, or owning property under the group’s name. One thing that isn’t mentioned in those prohibitions, though, is actual membership in the organization. That’s because, as I said, Japan is hugely gun-shy about criminalizing membership in any sort of organization, even organizations that have been declared criminal.[18]

It’s illegal to pick mushrooms on conservation lands if you’re doing it to raise money for your terrorist organization. It’s illegal to use protest sit-ins against new apartment buildings if you’re doing it on behalf of the mob. But it is not illegal to simply be a member of a terrorist organization or the mob—not even if that group has been formally dissolved by the government.

We can see a few places where this holds true even in the universe of My Hero Academia. The Shie Hassaikai is, like many yakuza groups, under police surveillance, but not barred outright from existing. Likewise, whatever prohibition there might once have been on printing material in support of the Metahuman Liberation Army has clearly lapsed, otherwise Curious would never have gotten away with reprinting Destro’s memoir.

Being a member of the MLA was likely not illegal as such, not any more so than membership in Aum Shinrikyo (currently calling themselves Aleph) or yakuza groups are in real life—they’re surveilled, sure, their activities curtailed, absolutely, but banned outright? Not so much. And membership in the PLF certainly wouldn't be banned even if it were legal to ban such memberships, seeing as it's brand new and, at the time of the raid, would not yet have been targeted for restrictions on its activity, lest such targeting tip the group off that the government was aware of its existence.

Keep that last point in mind; we’ll be coming back to it later, too.

Conspiracy

So, if membership in the PLF isn’t illegal in and of itself, what else can the government use to charge the 115,000 people they preemptively arrested?

Well, in general, for someone to be tried for a crime, they need to be either caught in the act or caught in an attempt. An attempted crime is something that is in immediate danger of happening—for example, if someone tries to kidnap a baby from the pediatric wing of a hospital but is caught by security before they make it out of the building, that’s an attempted kidnapping. An attempted crime may or may not be punished with the same severity as a successfully enacted crime, depending on the nature of the offense and the local laws.

What an attempted crime differs from, however, is a planned crime. If someone was planning to commit tax evasion but decided not to, they cannot be charged with tax evasion. This is how most criminal charges work—you can’t be charged with something you didn’t at least try to do, regardless of how close you came to it, and a policeman who tries to goad someone into such a crime should rightfully be running into charges of entrapment.

There are, unsurprisingly, some exceptions. It’s not uncommon for countries to criminalize planning insurrection or treason, and in cases like that, police are under absolutely no obligation to wait around for an active attempt before they respond. They can and will move as soon as they have sufficient evidence to get an arrest warrant. For lesser offenses, though, the legality of the advance-planning of a crime varies from country to country, and this is where we start getting into conspiracy.

Conspiracy in the legal sense has a couple of elements: it must be something that 1) two or more people 2) knowingly 3) discussed a plan for, which 4) led at least one person in the group to commit a “preparatory action.” i.e. do something to advance aforementioned plan.[19] All of these elements have to be proven to get everyone in a group on a conspiracy charge, though not all members of a group have to be in on all parts of a plan. If these elements are met, then everyone in the group can be charged with any and all crimes committed over the course of the plan being carried out, regardless of each member’s individual involvement.

What all this means for our purposes is that, because the heroes made the first move, they have to get the PLF on something that is illegal to even plan, not something that only becomes illegal in the attempt.[20] Huge portions of the PLF may wind up being released if the police can't conclusively prove not merely their association with the PLF, but also their direct knowledge of the relevant plans—not difficult for the ringleaders, obviously, but much dicier when you start getting out into the liberated districts. If the prosecution can't prove that knowledge, and lacks confessions otherwise—and as I’ll discuss in more detail later, a confession in and of itself is not considered sufficient; there has to be corroborating evidence[21]—huge swathes of those people are going to get cut loose.

So what are police going to be looking for? What crimes can the PLF be charged with under current law, and what are the sentences for such crimes like?

Prior to 1952, conspiracy was only illegal in the following cases: insurrection, treason, or aiding/abetting/instigating either of the above. Conspiracy to commit treason as a charge is right out—everything the PLF is doing, they’re doing for their own sake and for the sake of the future of Japan, not for the sake of a foreign power. Conspiracy to commit/instigate insurrection is more debatable, but, surprisingly, shakier than it might appear at first. This is because of the specific, legal definition of the term.

Japan’s Penal Code defines insurrection as rioting for the purpose of overthrowing the government, usurping the sovereignty of the State, or otherwise subverting constitutional order. The middle clause, the one regarding territorial sovereignty, is obviously not at issue—the PLF is not attempting to stake out land for a new country and secede. It’s the rest of the description that’s debatably more applicable, but still, to my eye, not an easy guilty verdict.

Firstly, per Hawks’ description of the plan, the PLF at least wants the government and the constitutional order intact enough for the Hearts & Minds Party to “storm the political world,” which to me suggests that their target is public opinion, not the intangible apparatus of the government itself. Further, even if you did argue that their manipulation of public opinion constitutes subversion of the constitutional order, you’d also have to argue the rioting part, and we have no idea whether any of the PLF’s plans actually involved a significant number of people mobbing in public as opposed to e.g. small strike teams.

So is the PLF off the hook? Not hardly! The Penal Code was established in 1907, after all—it’s been expanded lots since then, and those expansions are where the PLF really starts to run into trouble.

The Subversive Activities Prevention Act of 1952 criminalized a number of conspiracy-to-commit crimes—crimes like arson and homicide—if said crimes were to be undertaken “with the intent to promote, support or oppose any political doctrine or policy.” For example, conspiring to burn down a bank was not criminalized. Conspiring to burn down a bank as an act of protest against a new tax law became illegal as all get-out.

This gets us where we need to be for the PLF, as, on top of the crimes laid out in the 1952 act, I am very prepared to believe that acts of villainy (that is, illegal quirk use) in advancement of political ends have been folded into this particular branch of Japanese law.[22] So then, what kind of conspiracy charges are we looking at here, and what associated crimes?

I see two major possibilities at this point, and they hinge on exactly how much the prosecution ties Shigaraki’s attack on Jaku and Gigantomachia’s destruction to the run-of-the-mill PLF member sitting in a backwater town somewhere doing nothing more involved than e.g. quirk training and attending weekly meetings to get updates on where the plans stand for their local regiment’s part of the big push the following month. It’s difficult to say how feasible it is to make that connection—there are provisions in Japanese law for group criminal liability, but they tend to require things like joint actions, or specific knowledge and intent regarding the crime in question.

Obviously, random PLF members nowhere near Machia’s path of destruction didn’t take joint actions to abet it, so the pertinent question is, was Machia going on a rampage part of the plan? How about Shigaraki’s destruction of Jaku? If so, how much did random PLF members know about it? How specific does that knowledge need to be? If, say, the original plan had Shigaraki decaying the greater part of Hosu, does it still meet the specific knowledge requirement if he wound up decaying Jaku instead? If Machia was supposed to stampede across Tokyo, do the PLF members who chased after him count as furthering a conspiracy to do so when he stomped across Osaka and Kyoto instead?

Frankly, I don’t think we can say for sure how much a randomly selected member of the rank and file would have known. Any knowledge they had would have been many steps removed from the people actually making the plan; I would tend to think that the outer reaches of the PLF mostly knew about whatever plan their specific group would be tasked with, but would have much patchier knowledge of plans beyond that immediate sphere. As to how much that matters to the courts? Well, let’s take a look at the final logistics problem: the sentencing.

Sentencing Standards

First things first: I absolutely do not think the death penalty is on the table for the rank and file. People like Shigaraki and Dabi, yes, based on their pre-PLF crimes alone; Re-Destro and the other lieutenants are certainly a strong possibility. But the rank and file? No. Looking at our historical referents, it has never been the case that every single person involved in a mass arrest incident has been sentenced equally harshly, even in the case of the February 26 Incident’s outright uprising against the state! And that was in a time where human rights were considerably less enshrined in the constitution; in the modern day, the death penalty is usually reserved for murder cases,[23] typically only those involving multiple murders or particularly aggravated cases involving torture or ransom.

Whether or not the courts could attempt to punish all of the members of the PLF for all the deaths caused by Shigaraki and Gigantomachia under group criminal liability provisions, the degree of mass international outcry sentencing 115,000 people to death would involve is difficult to fathom. Egypt's 2014 mass trials of the Muslim Brotherhood are a good referent, and they “only” involved about 1,200 people.[24] Multiplying that number ten times over? I very much doubt Horikoshi is prepared to even imply that the system all these cute kids want to grow up and join is anywhere near that grisly and authoritarian.

Anyway, if the MHA government were that quick to hand down death sentences, I very much doubt Stain or All For One would still be alive—or, indeed, that Tartarus would serve much function at all. It's described, after all, as a place that houses those who threaten Japan's security on a fundamental, national level. That's the kind of thing countries keep death penalties around for.

That said, let’s assume for the time being that Shigaraki and Machia will be treated as their own thing, and what the PLF are going to be tried for is more in tune with the plan as Hawks laid it out. Remember again that the heroes attacked preemptively. This means that, in this scenario, all the conspiracy stuff is on the table, but it’s the only thing on the table—because it’s all the PLF had time to get to! There might be a few other charges—for example, if the black market support good proliferation is part of their plan, and the weapon proliferation is already underway, the whole group could feasibly be charged with whatever crime covers illegal weapon distribution. However, whatever crimes those support goods would be used to commit haven’t happened yet, so on that front, the PLF is still only on the hook for planning them.

Here, then, is what the Penal Code and its relevant revisions have to say about conspiracy sentences:

If they do wind up getting the group on conspiracy to incite insurrection:

A person who prepares for or plots an insurrection is punished by imprisonment without work for not less than 1 year but not more than 10 years.

(…)

A person who aids the commission of any of the crimes prescribed above by the supply of arms, funds, or food, or by any other act, is punished by imprisonment without work for not more than 7 years.

So that’s kinda bad! Not as bad as if they’d actually gotten to the insurrection, which is when death penalties and life sentences for ringleaders and key figures start cropping up, but still pretty bad! Seven years in prison is almost certainly enough time for a lot of those people to do some serious reconsideration of their life priorities!

As I already said, though, I think the insurrection charge is shaky. So what if they wind up instead charging the PLF with conspiracy to commit villainy for political aims?

Well, that’s why this whole section is in the logistics portion of this essay, because the sentencing for politically motivated villainy probably looks a lot more like this:

If it’s a crime on the level of, for political aims, preparing, plotting, inducing, or inciting:

Arson, illegal use of explosives, homicide, or robbery involving assault or intimidation: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding five years.

A public disturbance: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding three years.

A hazard for a train, tram, or vessel: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding—oh, three years again.

The assault or intimidation of a public employee in the performance of public duty[25]: spoilers, it’s imprisonment for not more than three years again.

Five years or less. Three years or less.

Is that enough time to make people reconsider their life choices? Especially people who have been raised all their lives to follow the cause of Liberation?

Remember that when the heroes attacked, the intention was a clean sweep, a preventative tactic to stop the villains before they could enact any of their terroristic plans. Yet if they intended to stop things at a point where only conspiracy would be punishable, is three years in prison all that Edgeshot thought these people would be in for when he said that if a single one of them escaped, they might go on to terrorize other places? What was Japan’s government and/or the Hero Public Safety Commission planning to do in three years, or five years, or ten years, when 17,000 to 115,000 people were released en masse from prison, free to return to their lives? It certainly seems like they had more stringent consequences in mind, does it?

Of course, there are other factors to consider.

Lots of these people would, presumably, be up on multiple charges, compounding their sentences. Certainly, if Shigaraki and Gigantomachia are tied to the rest of the group, their tolls of death and destruction could potentially be applied to any and all co-conspirators. And maybe the penalties for conspiracy to commit politically motivated villainy are worse. Maybe the prosecutors will push for insurrection conspiracy charges regardless of their applicability, and the Japanese courts will just let them, because there will be a profound thirst for “justice” after Gigantomachia’s rampage and a few human rights violations or abuses of the law will seem like just what the Paranormal Liberation Front members had coming to them.

Maybe, behind the immediate logistical problems presented by this mass arrest, there are a whole fleet of problems of a different nature.

Next time: let’s talk ethics.

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Footnotes (Part Two)

[7] Whose supporters were eventually successful, by the way. Look up the Telangana movement.

[8] For example, “Skeptic can access such high-tech satellites that he can get up-to-the-minute views on the heroes approaching Gigantomachia, but he somehow didn’t notice a literal hero battalion bearing down on the villa until they were charging out of the tree line? Seriously?”

[9] Frankly, another 2-3 Deikas is the simplest way to explain how they can have a group that big and still be totally unknown to society at large. Far easier to maintain a cult’s required isolation and secrecy when your strongholds are more “this town and everyone you know and love in it” and less “this fancy resort that everyone has to drive thirty minutes to an hour to get to from the totally normal towns they actually live in.”

[10] And frankly, I don't know that that the, “All their really good combatants are at the villa,” assumption is even justified, given that you'd think the people at the villa for the “conference” are more likely to be the people who are going to be involved in coordinating the upcoming assaults—lots of great combatants, sure, but also people who are going to be doing the organizational work, the supply work, etc.

[11] Presumably, at this point, our hypothetical 30% will be instructed to relocate to one of the hero school shelters, but that obviously wouldn’t have been in the plan from the beginning, given that the shelters were only opened after heroes started retiring in droves.

[12] For comparison, a mid-sized prison is considered by the American Jail Association to have 50 to 249 beds, and we’re way more prone to incarceration than Japan is.

[13] For example, in 2005 in Baltimore, so many arrests were being made based on quality-of-life crimes like loitering that the system couldn't keep up, leading to thousands of people having to be released because they just couldn't be processed in time.

[14] When AFO was first brought in, we were told that his remand to Tartarus pre-trial was without precedent. However, Chapter 297 describes Tartarus as a detention facility that only calls itself a prison—remember, in Japan, remand prisoners are supposed to be kept separate from tried and sentenced prisoners. Thus, Tartarus should be reserved only for those who are sentenced to it, or it shouldn't contain sentenced prisoners at all. But with 297, we find that such is no longer the case, as people can be put there “regardless of their sentencing status.” It's unclear whether this change was a rapid case of slippery slope in-universe or whether it's a simple retcon.

[15] Suspects get one visit from a “duty lawyer” for free during detention, but otherwise, the right to counsel only kicks in after charges are filed, and lawyers are not allowed to be present during questioning.

[16] Among many other factors, it would certainly help explain why All For One hasn't even been brought to trial yet. Hell, we don't even know if he's really been formally charged, though Pixie Bob’s comment back in Chapter 184 could easily be interpreted as meaning that the questioning process is still ongoing. AFO needs a Yasuda Yoshihiro, clearly.

[17] Though both acquittals and convictions can be appealed.

[18] An “organized criminal group” per Japanese law has a few qualifications to meet. They need to be committing crimes in an organized fashion, obviously, and there are laws determining which crimes qualify, but further, they need to be a sustained organization, one in which members have assigned roles and duties such that those duties advance a common cause sought after by the organization as a whole. Ergo, a yakuza group definitely qualifies, while an impromptu group of people who got together to murder their boss but who have no further common cause afterward does not. Groups like the Metahuman Liberation Army and the Shie Hassaikai obviously meet these standards, but e.g. the League of Villains, lacking much in the way of a common cause or defined roles, might not.

[19] Like buying a ski mask if their plan to rob a bank involves ski masks.

[20] This, obviously, applies only to members of the PLF who haven’t already broken other laws. The League is boned no matter what. Likewise, there are laws against e.g. harboring criminals that could be brought to bear against whoever maintains the villa, and so on and so forth.

[21] Though one huge issue is that other peoples' confessions can be counted as evidence against you, and yours against others.

[22] A highly controversial anti-conspiracy law in 2017 criminalized the planning of a whole array of new crimes, some bizarrely innocuous-looking, but because it was aimed mostly at the yakuza and other groups engaged in human trafficking, the new roster was generally criminalized on the basis that they were crimes intended to gain some material benefit for the organization planning them. The PLF’s plans were going to do a lot of things, but provide material benefit—a legal term for something that has monetary value—is decidedly not one of them.

[23] Though there are 19 offenses for which it is legally invokable.

[24] The greater majority of the sentences were commuted to “only” being life sentences, but that only by virtue of a relatively powerful upper court, which Egypt’s president has been working to diminish ever since. The state of fair trials and humane prison conditions in the country is pretty appalling right now.

[25] Continued, “committed collectively by carrying any deadly weapon or poison, against any person engaged in prosecutorial or police duties, any assistant to such official, any person who guards or escorts persons in legal custody, or any person engaged in an investigation under this Act.” There are a lot of riders on this one.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

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