I guess I've been saying this way too often now, but (sorry IS) I think all the confusion stems from using terms which are laden with meaning for some.
If we just had talked about a
situation where a hearing is warranted, and the member would prefer to avoid a hearing by acknowledging the offense, accepting responsibility, and agreeing to the determined penalty.
, as Cerin excellently defined it, we could have saved ourselves a lot of the confusion we had with juggling legal terms, I think.
For example, I would not want a "plea bargain" or "bench trial" or whatever other names there are, when that means letting someone off more lightly for pleading guilty.
I would, however, agree to having the possibility for someone to admit guilt and then dispense with the hearing and just accept a penalty - whatever that process would be called in any real life situation or whatever we end up calling it.
I had the impression that a lot of people wanted this, but Jny said they didn't, so I'm a bit confused about that now.
Basically, while I think it's not a bad thing to have, I'm just as happy to leave things as they were - I agree with Prim, that it's not really necessary to spare people the embarrassment - I just think we should have a quick count as to who is opposed to, using Voronwe's words this time,
the idea of allowing a member to admit to the offense and accept the determined penalty, rather than go through the hearing with a jury
.
Because I think that's all the definition this needs - and the process would be like Jny described:
The admin convenes the hearing, opens the thread, and state the reason for the hearing in the first post. Beyond that, there is no prosecutor. There is no defense attorney. There is no judge.
So, Jny, when you say:
Look, I took it out, because there are people who don't want a private hearing, and all the decisions we would have to make around that option are worse than not having the option.
If a person says, "yes, I did it. Sorry." the jury can tone down the penalty accordingly. The member has the right to ask that the thread be deleted, per above. That's enough.
Does that mean if the person says that, the hearing of witnesses etc can be dispensed with?
Because if it can, that's just the thing we've been arguing for, I think, invisible underneath all those legal terms, the idea would still be in there.
(Although, as an aside, while I agree with the possibility to shorten the process, I'm not sure I'm happy with the way this is phrased: toning down the penalty if the person appears to be sorry, sure - but let's not encourage admission of guilt with the promise of lesser penalties!)
I'm afraid this is not as clear as I had wished it to be - coming back to answer so many posts at once, it's bound to get confusing.
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My point was that we have to do more than throw a few characters in each other's direction
Ah, ok - thanks for explaining - I'd thought you'd just gone off your rockers with all this debate!
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I'm not against the idea, but I like some evidence that anything proposed is known to have worked in some venue
You mentioned programming, and how simple problems can be complicated by people doing things their own way instead of relying on proven ways of solution - I quite agree, but in this case, I think, the question is where to look for those time-approved solutions.
This is not a country or something similarly big. Therefore, precedents from real life law won't help much. If you want to use working examples, you'd have to look around at how other messageboards are governed!
However, I think our way to organise a board is pretty new - of the few "democratic" MBs I've heard of, many seem to have ended in chaos.
(You can see discussions on this on an MB called "The Admin Zone" - it's self-help for MB-admins, which, btw, I find quite scary to read.)
So, the way I see it, we are trying something quite unique here, which means there isn't much precedent to rely on - just the members' high ideals!
And those are nicely summed up in Jny's post:
They wanted to guarantee a couple basic things:
- that members could not be banned in secret
- that one person would not have absolute power
- that there would be recourse and transparency