Elfthreads!

[lintamande]

Canonical Elves don't have as much of a thing about imprisonment; there's the line about how Thingol put Lúthien in a treehouse because it was the only way to hold her without her dying, but that's it and he doesn't seem to have done anything with it as a general worldbuilding principle.

[BlueSkySprite]

Eeeeee! Sesame Street Luna's proposed role for Minor is very very cute!

[Throne3d]

Seconded.

[pedromvilar]

ohhhhh my godddddd minor is going to sinnnnngggg that is way too precious for words

[jalapeno_dude]

"If Jake had tortured slavers to death, and in so doing ended slavery -"
"Then I imagine the courts in Revelation would see it your way, and be inspired to invent the same approach to law that we were inspired to invent."

Don't particularly want to debate the ethics at the moment, but it seems highly unlikely to me that this would be the case. There's a substantive distinction between "found innocent of a crime" and "pardoned of a crime" (and the jurisdiction issue seems even clearer to me when you think about this).

[DanielH]

Also not interested in arguing ethics, partially because there are so few details.

They would not have adopted that exact solution, but they would potentially combine pardoning and asylum in an interesting way. The Elves would say the humans do not have the authority to claim full jurisdiction because a major component of the crime was an unjust law of the humans’.

Simplifying ethics out of this as far as I can, in a way much more sympathetic to the Elves than the original situation, helping a slave escape is illegal, especially if it results in the death of the slave owner. Suppose Jake had helped slaves escape and had unavoidably killed seven slave owners in the process. The country they escape to finds slavery abhorrent but still considers any intentional death worthy of trial. They might acquit him of kidnapping, pardon him for the murders, and offer him asylum from the people who still want to try him.

Again, this is not ethically equivalent, just my attempt at being legally illustrative.

[lintamande]

Agree with DanielH that that's an illustrative example, only the Elven legal system is much more inclined than the human one to treat extenuating circumstances as exonerating, partially due to miscellaneous cultural differences and partially because the law was built around exonerating kinds of extenuating circumstances (holing a planet to stop Melkor, being under an oath you took as a child, etc. etc.). Cam's case set a precedent which this decision is a consequence of.

[jalapeno_dude]

They might acquit him of kidnapping, pardon him for the murders, and offer him asylum from the people who still want to try him.

...I guess I don't see how the country in question, which is not the country where the (potential) crimes were committed, has the authority to try and/or pardon Jake for kidnapping or murder. Certainly it could/should refuse to deport him to a country where he'll be tried for what it doesn't consider a crime (helping slaves escape), and/or attempt to change the legal situation in that country (by means up to and including war, in drastic cases). But that's different than *finding Jake innocent*.

(I am aware of the principle of universal jurisdiction, but that seems much more directed at things like war crimes than kidnapping and murder, and the usual application is finding someone guilty when other jurisdictions will not, rather than the other way around...)

Of course we know the Valar canonically have had trouble with the concept of jurisdiction, c.f. their intervention to charge Feanor over threatening Fingolfin and Galadriel refusing to return to Valinor in part because she didn't admit they had the authority to pardon her, so I guess it makes sense that the Vanyar would as well!

EDIT: Since I started writing this post it looks like a lot of this has been addressed in-thread.

[Unbitwise]

It would be nice if touch and go and stay in touch were in a continuity or had links.

[Alicorn]

I feel weird about elevating a two thread continuity into a, well, continuity. It is smol.