Rise From the Ashes is such a great case. It was my favorite Ace Attorney case all the way up until the final case of the entire Phoenix Wright arc. Even now, with as many playthroughs of it has I've done, I am surprised by how gripping it really is as it crescendos up to the climax.

Anyway, I got to thinking about Lana's predicament and, added altogether, I can't really find anything to suggest she willfully did anything wrong. Unlike Jake Marshall, who stole things and beat up people, justifying his means by the end, Lana doesn't even have to claim that much. Falsifying evidence is wrong but what choice was she faced with? Either go along with it or have her sister framed for a crime that was committed by the person who told her to falsify the evidence in the first place. Who's she going to run to when the only person she could report his misdeeds to happens to be the exact same person? Kind of hard to fight those odds. She had to go along with the staging of the crime scene because the alternative was far worse and really no one could do anything about it.

It's a flawless blackmail and I don't think anyone would have been able to work out a situation where they didn't have to play puppet to Damon Gant. Lana willingly accepts blame for her actions but trying to get dirt on her in any kind of post-mortem inquiry would probably get her cleared of all charges. There was no way out, except the endgame that resulted in the trial (the only unraveling possible would have been Gant's own).

Gant is such a perfect circle of evil (blackmail, framing a 14-year old girl without a second thought, corruption, evidence forgery...what a list). I can't think of a time I felt so rewarded for bringing down the true culprit (even 3-5, despite ultimately being my favorite case in the series, had a much more tragic end that did feel bittersweet).

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I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Forging evidence is just wrong. Joe Darke ended up being convicted for the murder of Neil Marshall even though he didn't do it. I know you can't really feel sorry for him since he did kill other people, but for that murder, that's not really fair.
If Ema had really accidentally killed Neil, as it looked like she did, then the right thing to do would have been to have her tried for it. I mean, I can totally understand why Lana did what she did, but that wasn't right.
And even if Gant blackmails her to do something, that doesn't take off her responsibility for it.

Thinking about it, Lana actually did a lot of serious crimes, even though she was blackmailed into doing them. She stabbed someone. Forging evidence, perverting the cause of justice and being boring.

Aside all that she was a real tool to cross examine...and defend what with all the self-confessing.

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Did SHE really forge anything, though? As far as I can tell, the most you could say about her is she put her hands on the soiled evidence. It was Gant who came up with the idea to fabricate the scenario and also who passed along the tainted goods to Edgeworth. She arranged it at his direction but I can't find any evidence to suggest she actually created any of the dirty laundry.

As for stabbing people...well, I guess I can concede that she tampered with a crime scene...sorta. The "crime scene" was not preserved by her messing with the body but, again, you have to look to Gant for the actual doing behind it (he moved the body from the actual crime scene and into Edgeworth's car, she simply picked up the dead body and ran a different knife through it). The worst you can say about the parking lot scene is that she introduced a foreign knife into an already deceased person, which really doesn't hurt the case nearly as much as moving the body from the original scene in the first place (gives her an alibi to plead guilty if that's her plan but Phoenix didn't buy that anyway so the point is rendered moot).

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Lana is probably charged with being an accessory to the forgery. She was involved, and she had at least partial knowledge of the forgery. Also desecration of a corpse (which includes removing stuff from it and sticking things into it).

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In order to protect Ema from being framed by Gant (and AFAIR at the time she didn't know the evidence against Ema was fabricated, so as far as she knew she was covering up a homicide), she got directly involved in (or at least turned a blind eye to) Gant's framing of an unspecified number of innocent people and/or letting guilty people go free. Certainly duress is a mitigating factor, but in my opinion she really shouldn't be getting off the hook completely.

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Legally speaking, one important thing she's guilty of is accessory after the fact to Goodman's murder. In Ace Attorney it seems that Sal Manella got less than 2 1/2 years for a similar offense (though in that case the homicide was quite arguably self-defense.) Perjury doesn't seem to get charged very often in the AA universe, since the only person in a series where like 80% of the witnesses are liars who actually seems to get charged with perjury is

The games don't go into much detail about all the things Gant is implied to have blackmailed her into in between SL-9 and the Goodman murder, so I'll go on the two incidents that the game actually covers.

Here are some charges that might potentially get filed against her. I'm not enough of a legal expert here to know what exactly applies, whether or not some of the charges I'm listing are basically the same thing, and which jurisdictions have each of these specific offenses as a chargable crime. Filing a large number of charges for what is essentially one offense is often frowned on, but it's certainly not unheard of for a person to be charged with forgery for making a false document and also perjury for submitting that same document to a court. Here are allegations a prosecutor might look into:

For the Joe Darke thing:

Evidence tampering/concealment, crime scene tampering, falsifying a public record (if she made up documents in that case), perjury (if she knowingly submitted false documents or false signed statements to the court or testified), obstruction of justice, lying to investigators.

While it was an "accident," she also helped the murderer, which may constitute accessory to murder (though knowing that the person being protected from the law is guilty is usually a necessary element to being a criminal accessory). Although she was mistaken, she attempted to cover up what she thought was something like involuntary manslaughter (though such a charge against Ema would require a demonstration that she engaged in criminal recklessness or negligence).

A few of those charges (lying to investigators) are misdemeanors for which the statute of limitations may have passed, but perjury and obstruction of justice in a felony investigation are felonies.

For the Bruce Goodman case, it's many of the same offenses:

Accessory after the fact to murder, perjury (for lying on the stand), lying to investigators, obstruction of justice, evidence tampering/concealment, tampering with a body, etc. Maybe an assault or battery charge for fighting Angel Starr.




And that makes her less guilty... how? The fact that she was under coercion might be worth something, but a court will not acquit someone on the basis of "I didn't forge it, I just knew it was being forged, was in on the plan to forge it, consulted with the forger, deceived Edgeworth, instructed Edgeworth to present the forged evidence in court, covered up the forgery, and let Gant fire the other people who suspected it."

It's like how were legally guilty of murder in Justice For All.

All parties to a crime, who participated in the commission of the offense and acted in concert with the physical perpetrator as full accomplices (rather than mere accessories after the fact) are guilty of the same offense as the physical perpetrator and are considered co-principal perpetrators.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displ ... file=30-33


I watched an episode of After The First 48 (a non-fiction show about homicide investigations) in which the state of Nevada pressed murder charges against 7 individuals, 5 of whom the prosecutor's office at one point sought a death sentence for, for a single murder carried out by a single shooter. It was allegedly a hired hit that the other people involved had allegedly either ordered, handed off the money for, helped set up, driven with the shooter to, conspired on, etc. None of them were actually sentenced to death, but all 6 of them EXCEPT the alleged shooter were convicted of or plead guilty to murder. (The alleged assassin was somehow found guilty of conspiracy to commit the murder but found not guilty of the murder itself.) The three who were convicted in a trial all got life sentences with parole eligibility after several decades.

Note that conspiracy to murder (or any other offense) IS a lesser offense than murder (or whatever the underlying offense is), but a "conspiracy to murder" charge usually refers to a conspiracy to commit a murder that didn't actually happen. If it actually happened, anyone who conspired to make it happen is usually guilty of murder. The same goes for conspiracy to commit forgery.