Each district has a judge. Judges are responsible for running the district and they are really more like little Kings in a district, however they still go by the title of Judge.
In order to be able to run for judge a character must have level 3 oratory skill and must be a member of the social level of Citizen of the social ranking system that conforms with the district's morality alignment. If the district is of low morality, the character must be an Underground Citizen, if the district is of high morality, the character must be an Society Citizen.
The judge has two main fields of activities: Criminal judging and district management.
The Judge's task here is to examine crime files that have been sent to him by the prosecutor and to decide whether there is enough evidence to open a trial. After the trial, the Judge has to decide which sentence to apply to a convicted criminal. He does all this from the Judge dialog which is brought up from the terminal's Justice Tab:
There are three buttons under the list which filter the cases you have available. The filtered cases will then be displayed in the top list. The filters are:
When you select the Not Open cases, you can see who is the main suspect in the static field further down. If you want to take a closer look at the case, you can create a copy of the case. You can create as many copies as you like and give them to whomever you like, however it may be taken unfriendly by other players if you hand out copies too freely. Treat crime files like you would in reality. You can destroy any copy that you create from the Misc Tab. These copies are just copies and at the current state you cant add or remove anything from the file any more.
Now you can decide whether you want to Open the Session or Send it Back To the Prosecutor. You can not destroy the crime file since at this stage there is already too much publicity involved. If you want to do the criminal a favor however, you can just let the file sit and rot or send it back to the prosecutor so that he may destroy it. Of course the victim of the crimefile will not like this and might start a campaign against you to keep you from being reelected, maybe find something to blackmail you or perhaps simply kill you. Remember, as government official you can automatically be entered in anybody's permakill list.
These cases wait for the jury member to find a verdict. This can take up to two days. After all jurors have come to a verdict, the case is either dismissed and destroyed or it moves over to the Awaiting Sentence section.
These cases are waiting for you to find a verdict. The defendants have been found guilty in these cases. To assign a sentence, select a case, then select a timeframe in the Sentence box below. The timeframe can only be chosen from the predefined range for this type of crime. You must always select the only available option "Prison" in the punishment box, since this is currently the only type of punishment available. Then click Send Punishment and you're done. You will now receive an XP award for successfully handling a crime case. However if you don't apply a punishment and rely on the system to do it for you, you will loose some XP. You have 2 days after a guilty verdict was found to decide on the sentence or the system will do it for you.
The other task of the judge is to manage the district. When you click on the manage button in the Justice Tab of the terminal, the following dialog opens:
You have the following options here:
You can either allow or forbid prostitution in your district. When prostitution is forbidden, every prostitute who closes a deal in a street has a chance of a crime being generated against her. Prostitution in private houses is not prosecuted. The probability of a prostitution crime depends on the prostitute's Hooker skill and the customers observation skill. If the customer is a PC guard, there is always a crime generated.
You can determine the property taxes that all characters have to pay daily for houses they own in your district. The absolute percentage is an internal constant. However you can set a percent rate based on that absolute percentage. Example: The absolute percentage is 10% of the house value (just an example) and you set the tax rate to 100% then the full 10% will be charged to every house owner every day. If you set the tax rate to 50% then only 5% (half of 10%) will be charged and so on.
You select a tax goal here, but the actual tax rate is adjusted one point a day. So if the current rate is say 30% and you want to move it to 50% then it will take the server 20 days to actually reach the 50% and so on. This is to prevent a malicious player from messing up the tax rate too easily.
You also see your current district treasure in this section.
You can determine the number of NPC guards this district should send on patrol every day in the lower left section. Just enter the new number of NPC guards and send it and from the next day on this number of NPC guards will patrol the district. The more guards, the higher the chance that wanted criminals are caught, the safer PCs are from NPC attacks and so on. NPC guards however cost money every day which is withdrawn from your budged and which can only be replaced by tax money collected.
The rest of the dialog is for PC guard management. First of all you see in the list who is a PC guard. You can remove any character from guard status by selecting his name and then click on Remove Guard. To make a character a guard, you must select him in your paperdoll view before you open this dialog at the terminal and then click Make Character Guard. PC guards alse receive a daily payment that is taken from your treasure.
As described in the guards section, PC guards can work on crime files. Since this cost money, you can reimburse a guard by sending him a sum of credits from your treasure. Just select the guards name in the list, enter the amount of money to be transferred to him and click Reimburse Guard. Beware, that these transactions are publicly listed in your district's History Webpage, so if you think about skimming off the top, remember, the public can see it too and may react in a way you won't like.
A judge has one more duty and that is done from the Warrants Dialog from the terminal's justice page:
The dialog allows everybody to select any district to examine, but the judge should select his district in the top right corner and click Show District since he can only change the values for his district. Other characters can see the data but not change them.
The lower left list shows the districts our districts, we extradite to. The lower right list shows the districts which extradite to us. To change the districts we extradite to, chose a district in the drop down box in the lower left corner and click Accept to extradite to or Remove to remove the district from the ones we extradite to.
Our guards can arrest only criminals who have a warrant running in our district or in a district to which we extradite.
A criminal who is wanted in our district can only be arrested by guards from our district or from a district that extradites to us.
It doesn't matter where the arrest is made, only what guard is making it. NPC guards will not attempt to arrest a criminal if their district doesn't extradite to the districts in which the criminal is wanted. Please not that a warrant for the same criminal may have been issued in several districts if the criminal has committed crimes in multiple districts and was convicted in some of them.
(c) 2005, Sociolotronics LLC