All Crimes Are Equal: Difference between revisions

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This is what happens if [[The Empire]] is run by a bunch of [[Lawful Stupid]] people afflicted with [[Black and White Insanity]].

* Officer Shrift from ''[[The Phantom Tollbooth]]'' regularly sentences offenders to prison terms of millions of years, merely because he can. Fortunately, he's not good at keeping track of time, so assumes that anyone who escapes his city's [[Cardboard Prison]] has served out his or her time.

* In the first book of the ''Engineers'' trilogy, ''Devices and Desires'', one of the main characters—Ziani Vaatzes—escapes prison after being sentenced to death. While escaping, he kills a guard with a lamp, dismembers another and decapitates a third. He then commits theft, arson, identity theft, and breaking & entering while escaping. The original crime he was sentenced to execution for? Creating a machine which contained components up to 1/8 inches off of the commercial standard—for personal use.

* Barely subverted in the ''[[Discworld]]'' book ''[[The Wee Free Men]].'' One of Tiffany's flashbacks relates the tale of a woman who had stolen a baby. When confronted, the woman was clearly not in her right mind and genuinely believed the baby hers. Everyone was aware of this, but the laws were clear on theft and kidnapping, and Miss Robinson would've been sent to prison regardless. Only the subtle intervention of Tiffany's Granny Aching convinced the Baron sitting in judgment to seek out an alternative option.

* The ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' series has the Village of Fowl Devotees, which holds the punishment for all crimes as burning at the stake. It's mentioned that even putting too many nuts on a sundae is grounds for this. But then, this is a series that really doesn't take itself seriously.