I understand that, aside from telling us that

were sentenced to death, the games like to keep it vague about what the punishments for crimes are. However, there are certain cases in which I think the games could have been improved through a brief discussion of it.






Wouldn't a few conversations like that make the games more interesting?

I wouldn't mind more dialogue about sentences. I actually find it a bit frustrating that the games avoid the issue so much. They make it seem like there's nothing beyond "guilty" or "not guilty". I understand that it works better from a gameplay point of view, but I'd like to know more about judicial system of the AA universe.

Personally, I think only a handful of cases could use this kind of treatment with the dialogue, and you already named most of them. Don't get me wrong, the judicial system in the world of Ace Attorney is a compelling topic that warrants exploration, either by the game writers themselves or by fanfiction writers. But with the Phoenix Wright games, it's more about the journey, not the destination. In most cases (key word is most), you don't need to know anything beyond "Guilty" or "Not Guilty".

But although not much can be done about the current cases, there is the potential in future cases being a lot more grey. Here are a few scenarios I came up with off the top of my head in which sentencing would be relevant, some of which I actually used in my own fanfiction:

~The true villain hypnotizes the defendant into committing the murder.

~The murder was an accident (perhaps a defective magic trick? ).

~The true villain coerced the defendant into committing the murder (admittedly more plausible than the hypnotizing scenario, but I personally think the former is more interesting. ).

But, that's just my thinking. And I have a weird mind. So make of that what you will.

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Under typical U.S. law, criminal homicides are divided into categories from most to least serious:

first-degree murder
second-degree murder
voluntary manslaughter
involuntary manslaughter (reckless)
involuntary manslaughter (negligent)

All of those crimes are felonies. There are situations, such as justified self-defense, in which killing someone does not result in a conviction of any of those crimes.

Here are my verdicts based on a limited understanding of real U.S. law:



Based on the fictional portrayal of hypnosis as a form of complete mind control, not guilty. In the real world in which you can't really be hypnotized unless you want to be, I'm not sure. Probably not guilty of murder, because murder usually requires purposely or knowingly killing the victim. This would require that they are either aware of the nature of what they're doing while killing, or that they're aware at the time they get hypnotized that their conduct is practically certain to result in killing.

I'd say that unless they knew what they were doing or knew that the hypnotizer was almost certainly going to have them kill someone, they're not guilty of murder. However, if they knew that there was a substantial risk of it, they're guilty of reckless involuntary manslaughter. If they knew enough that a reasonable person would have concluded that there was an unjustifiable risk in getting hypnotized and would have been far more careful than they were, they're guilty of negligent involuntary manslaughter.


For murder, not guilty, unless they knew that they were killing the person when they acted to kill them or knew that killing the person was a practically certain result. However, under the felony murder rule, it's murder if the accident happened while the defendant was committing a dangerous felony (like arson, prison escape, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, robbery, or a plot to murder someone else). For involuntary manslaughter, guilty if the death resulted from negligence or recklessness on the part of the defendant.





Probably guilty; in my home state, being under duress is a legally valid defense for every crime except murder.

Huh. I might need to touch up some of my work when the Objection Archive gets back online.

Cases involving the insanity plea and plea bargaining could also make for interesting sentencing-based dialogue (although those aren't specific scenarios per se, just aspects of the case). I mean, we've dealt with why not throw some more legalese into the mix?

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Okay, so here's California's definition of involuntary manslaughter. It's slightly different from (my home state of) Missouri's definition that I gave in the above posts:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displ ... le=187-199


"Due caution and circumspection" is what a person has to use to avoid being guilty of involuntary manslaughter under that definition.

For what it's worth, in the hypnosis thing, I was also using the Missouri definitions of whether a person is in a mental state in which they can be guilty of a crime. Here are Missouri and California's definitions.






Anyway, I've got a fanfic in my head in which Mia goes up against Manfred in a sentencing phase defending a burglar who was convicted of murder under Hammond's defense. After being found guilty, the defendant says that he was in another room when the other burglar started attacking the victim and that he ran in and urged the other burglar to stop. (This does, by the way, make them both guilty of murder under the laws of almost every state.) She gets to cross-examine the other burglar while fighting against Manfred's efforts to get a death sentence.

By the way, most U.S. states allow a person who participates in a dangerous felony that ends in death to be convicted of murder even if such person did not kill, attempt to kill, or intend to kill. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such a person cannot be sentenced to death unless they are a major participant who showed extreme indifference to human life.