At 13:30 14/05/01 +0000, you wrote:

Tavia wrote:

Oops. I accidentally sent this just to Jenny instead of to the Lyst. Trying again...

This from a society that appears to have no official

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death penalty (I may be wrong).

The only reference we have to a death penalty in series 1 is in Breakdown, where Kayn, when talking about Gan's limiter, says, "A dangerous psychopath, certainly. Or would you prefer he'd been excecuted?" This certainly tells us that in Kayn's mind a limiter implant is an alternative to a death sentence, but it doesn't really tell us if the death penalty is officially active in the Federation. Unofficially of course, it's rife.

Federation criminal justice is an interesting topic, with, alas, as usual quite limited info from the series. As far as the death penalty goes, there do seem to be several references.

Also in 'Breakdown', while discussing suitable planets to take Gan to, Avon dismisses going to Cassiona, a Federation world, because: "There's a price on our heads. We are all under sentence of death."

In 'Spacefall', Raiker mentions 'the Commander's right to order execution' when punishing prisoners on board the London. 'Summary execution' is referred to again later by Blake as an alternative to 'volunteering' to board Liberator.

In 'Shadow', Avon twice refers to the mandatory death sentence for possession of Shadow, which was presumably introduced some time before series one (since he offers it as a good reason for Jenna not to have accepted a cargo of Shadow pre-series).

In 'Horizon', Orac finds out about the death of Ro's father (presumably - it's never made explicit, but this is the information Cally gives Ro). According to Orac: "I was instructed to obtain anything relating to the planet. The data was obtained by cross-referencing prisoner and execution lists. It is standard procedure".

'Summary execution' gets another outing as the penalty for boarding a Federation ship without Authority ('Aftermath'/'Powerplay') - this is a kind of civilian/miltary crossover situation, however.

Vaguer references to death as a punishment include

Servalan's reference to 'The punishment is total', referring to people talking about Blake's actvities. Not a specific reference, but quite unfriendly-sounding.

Servalna's reference to Krantor being placed on 'the Council's death list', but how legal a list this is is unspecified.

Of course, the Federation also goes in for applying the death penalty on a planetary scale. The Solium bomb seems to be an officially apporved and installed bit of equipment designed to deal with rebellions en masse.

Jenny

love Anna