"We were upset. Asked them to stop the executions, said we'd take the prisoners, but they didn't want to do that -"

"It'd be kind of irresponsible - you could pay their prison costs -"

"Elves experience imprisonment as torture and even once it was clarified that Amentans don't it was hard to be thrilled about that as a solution, though if they'd offered we'd probably have done it. We - none of us had ever known anyone who'd died forever, let alone someone we'd talked to two days earlier. It was horrible. We could've - we could've gone to Voa the very minute he said he could get in trouble for it -"

"But you - what, thought he was lying?" asks Grownup Katin.

"Thought that there'd be a process - like, hey, this person is accused of treason for talking with aliens, perhaps the conversation with the aliens is evidence and some effort could be made to reach out to them - thought that maybe he'd just heard exaggerated news stories because surely no state however dysfunctional could possibly murder its children for curiosity - the Enemy wouldn't do that! It's just such a fanatically stupid waste of your best and brightest and most capable young minds - he built a radio dejammer out of music box parts -

- thought that even an evil government would probably restrain itself from snap murders the day aliens arrived on their planet because, you know, unusual circumstances warrant extra caution -

- thought that basically no one could possibly be that evil."

"I don't think of Voa as being particularly evil," says Isama. "Just conservative and sort of ponderous."

"All your societies are kind of evil."

"Most places don't have the luxury of citizens who'll follow the law even if nothing happens if they don't."

"I don't begrudge you the law enforcement, it's the penalties that are all out of whack - if I were running a Amentan society I think the punishment for building radio dejammers would be enough in fines that radio dejammer parts were unaffordable and an assignment to some war-injured task so they could understand why it was bad to do anything that could be interpreted as threatening the ceasefire -"

"And lots of judges would probably knock it down from treason to reckless ignorance of security directives and assign a penalty like that, given the facts you describe, but not all of them, depending how he interviewed -"

"Interviews are a stupid way to do it and I continue to have the complaint that the content of the conversation with us was relevant and that zero effort was made to get it."

"How would you improve on interviews -"

"Earth is its own kind of horrible but they've got trials which seem better set up to make sure relevant evidence comes to light."

"What do they do?" asks Shasali.

"I should fetch Timothy - Niblet do you mind -"

Niblet fetches him.

" - sure - so it's 1809 or so by now back home, and English law's had the same basic form since 1100 or so - the style, not the content of the laws enforced, that is. In broad strokes: there's a judge, there's a prosecutor whose job it is to compile evidence that the accused is guilty, and there's a defender whose job it is to compile evidence that the accused should not be found guilty. The state's not obliged to let the accused have a defender but it's gotten fashionable and will probably be mandatory soon, and it's how I planned to do it once I ruled the world. They're obliged by law to share material evidence with each other even if it doesn't help their side - so if the investigating police find footprints on the scene which don't match the defendant's foot size, they still have to tell the defender about it to make sure the defender can fashion the best possible defense.

Sometimes, of course, the evidence is decisive and the best the defender can do is coach their client on how to navigate the system to their own benefit - plead guilty to a lesser charge, say, or cooperate in exchange for a reduced sentence, or persuade the judge of the merits of a sentence less than that strictly prescribed. And often it's not in their interests to argue actual innocence, just that the state has failed to meet the burden of proof for the charges they're filing. 

Rights of the accused - you have the right not to testify, and cannot be jailed for refusing to testify, though you can be convicted without your testimony if there's enough other evidence. You have the right to face your accuser - so any witnesses can't just send in a statement, they have to testify and answer questions from the state and from the defense in court. In the colonies you have the right to have the case adjudicated not by a judge but by a pool of your peers." 

"Why is the right to face your accuser important?" Shasali asks. "If somebody's dragged in front of me for molesting her nephew I don't want to make her brother ever be in a room with her again. And people's peers don't know anything about the law -"

"That's the idea, you'd better have a legal system that peoples' peers can make sense of. If the defense can't question witnesses then it's going to be far harder to tell if the witnesses are honest. Much easier to write and send in a misleading or dishonest summary than to stand up in court and answer for it. I'm sure people find testifying upsetting but that's less important than getting the right answer." 

"This all sounds so cumbersome and intrusive," says Shasali.

"Doesn't it bother you that sometimes you execute innocent people?"

"I've never had to execute anyone I actually thought was innocent. I'm sure I have an error rate but I'm sure this cumbersome intrusive thing does too."

" - but - it matters a lot how large the error rate is, all systems with an error rate greater than zero are not equal -"

"You could convince me that their error rate is so much better it's worth all this - poorly incentivized evidence-sharing and roping random bystanders who don't know what they're doing in to hear all the facts - but vague fondness for the system isn't how."

"We could cheat with Veritaserum and check, if we've got routine interworld access."