The judicial desk

PlateNet ships an in-game judicial system. It is roleplay, like everything else here - an invented system for an invented community, with no connection to any real court.

Sign in and choose JUDICIAL on the portal. The desk has three screens: DOCKET, CALENDAR and WARRANTS.

What a case is, and where it comes from

There are two kinds and they arrive in completely different ways.

**Criminal cases are opened at the judicial desk, from a document your community has already produced.** They cannot be typed from scratch. At the foot of the docket, OPEN A CASE lists everything eligible:

- an approved arrest report - an active or served warrant - a contested citation

Each document can be opened once. Opening it puts the case straight onto the docket, copies the charges, and keeps a link back to the source, so a case can always be traced to the paperwork it rests on.

An approved arrest report only appears in that list if the **arrestee named on it matches exactly one person record** in your community. A report has no defendant field - its people are free-text rows, because most of them are witnesses - so the desk matches on name and date of birth and refuses to guess between two people with the same name. If a report you expect is missing, open it and import the subject from the records index; it will appear here afterwards. The docket tells you how many reports are being held back for this reason.

Civil cases are filed by civilians, from their own portal, against another character or against a department, and they land on the docket the moment they are filed. See the civilian side.

The lifecycle

Every case moves through the same states, and the docket shows the current one on every row.

| | | |---|---| | ACCEPTED | On the docket. Every case starts here, the moment it is opened or filed. | | SCHEDULED | A hearing is on the calendar. | | HEARD | The hearing happened and was recorded. | | DECIDED | A verdict and, where there is one, a sentence. | | CLOSED | Finished and filed away. | | DISMISSED | Ended without a verdict. |

The counter strip above the docket shows the only three numbers that ever ask for action: how many are open, how many are scheduled, and how many have been heard and are awaiting a decision.

Scheduling

A hearing needs a date and time, a length, a courtroom label and a judicial officer.

Conflict warnings

When you schedule or move a hearing, PlateNet checks the slot and tells you if:

- that judicial officer is already sitting another case then, - that courtroom is already booked, or - a party on this case is due in another case at the same time.

These are warnings, not refusals. You are told, and you decide. A community may genuinely want two matters in one sitting, and a CAD that argues with a roleplay decision is a CAD people work around.

Moving a hearing

MOVE THE NEXT HEARING asks for a reason, because the parties are being told to change their plans and they are shown what you wrote. The old hearing stays on the case file as ADJOURNED with its reason. The calendar shows a moved hearing only at its new time, so nobody plans around a slot that no longer exists.

Pleas

A defendant enters guilty, not guilty or no contest from their own portal, before the hearing. The plea appears on the case and on the docket row, and changing it is allowed - every version is kept, with who entered it and when, and the superseded ones stay visible.

Pleas close once a case has been heard. The plea is part of the record the verdict rests on and rewriting it afterwards would rewrite that.

The judicial desk can also record a plea agreement with its terms, which is a different thing from a plea the defendant entered and is labelled as such.

The verdict

The OUTCOME block takes a disposition and, for a criminal case, a fine, a custodial term and a probation term; for a civil case, a judgment amount. The dispositions offered depend on the kind of case - a civil case cannot end in "guilty".

A conviction is written back to the fictional CRI record. Guilty and no contest add a JUDICIAL DISPOSITIONS block to the person's records return: the docket number, the charges, the sentence and the date. It appears on the QUERY screen and inside the return document itself, and it reaches returns an officer already had open - a records index that only tells the truth to the next person to look is not a records index.

Acquittals and dismissals are not written back. A record listing the cases somebody was charged with and won is a record that punishes being charged.

If a verdict is later changed, the block is rebuilt rather than added to, so the record can go backwards as well as forwards.

Who is told what

| Party | Where they are told | |---|---| | Officers, witnesses, counsel | An EmbedBanner card in the CAD, which stays until acknowledged | | Defendants, plaintiffs, respondents | Their civilian portal, on the JUDICIAL tab |

Both come from the same record, so a notice answered in one place does not come back in the other. A party with no player account simply is not notified - there is nobody to notify, and they still appear on the case.

Every state change is written to the community's audit log.

Back to the PlateNet documentation index / All Records pages