Ammunation Vice Point (North Point Mall) vs [EAF]Nylez

[stormeus]

Court of Vice City Fiat justitia. 17 Bayshore Ave. Downtown Vice City, FL 33128

As an aside regarding posting arguments for one side or the other in court threads: I'd welcome people to share their opinions with the court about cases and why one side should be allowed to win. However, I'd need to look into an organized way of allowing outsiders to share opinions with the court without directly involving themselves in the case and causing distracting back-and-forths. I'll probably have something for a future case, but for now I ask that people not make open arguments in the courtroom.

What follows is a summary of the arguments made in the case and remarks about their interpretation by the court so that citizens can understand why the outcome was reached. The actual decision can be found at the very end of the post.


Seeing as the defendant's main argument is that the evidence is inadmissible due to a lack of roleplay, the decision of the court largely hinges on the interpretation of what's considered roleplaying. The idea that civilians have to fully roleplay surveillance for evidence to count is easily dismissed, as prior cases have established a precedent of accepting this degree of roleplay in evidence for civilians, including Brian v. Robd and Klaus v. Brian. Other relevant cases aren't available for analysis since their evidence has been lost or destroyed. (Thanks ImageShack.)

Explicitly stating that some sort of recording equipment such as a camera or microphone is on makes it unambiguous that anything after that is admissible. However, for civilian cases this is mostly a formality. We can infer here that the evidence was recorded from the truck.

Moreover, the distinction between "roleplayed" and "non-roleplayed" doesn't exist in the case. Writing to global chat does not disqualify statements as "out-of-character" because that'd contradict Argonath's own policy against IC/OOC distinctions. The evidence submitted even shows the defendant even participating in what he would consider an RP context, using local chat to inspect the truck before destroying it.

Because of that, these statements:

Reaper: no stock man
Reaper: is business
Reaper: competition

Are part of the same roleplay context, even if they're not in local chat, and clearly establish that this was a business-motivated decision taken by the owner.

Moreover, there's the matter of who's responding to a lawsuit where the employee involved is also the business owner. The business is clearly the entity being sued. Still, the owner still "exists" to an extent, and can't establish a defense by claiming to have fired themselves. They assume two separate identities, so to speak — their identity as the employee and their identity as the business owner.

Even though the "employee" is dead and can't speak about things like the ensuing police chase, what they were doing before the incident, etc., the business owner still assumes responsibility for the actions of the now-dead employee if their actions were part of the business's operations. The consequence of this is that since the owner's only defense is that their actions were not related to the running of their business, which has been disproved in this case.

(To that end, if ownership of a business actually does change in the middle of a lawsuit, the new owner must assume legal responsibilities and represent the business. The old owner can still be brought in to testify on business-related decisions as a previous owner, but is still prohibited from speaking about anything from his "employee" persona.)

Finally, there's the matter of whether the business or the individual should be held responsible. If the employee acts on their own volition and without connection to the business, this is a case that could be made, and is an argument that was used by the defendant. However, we've already established that all evidence in this case is admissible, and so we can make the logical connection that this was a business-related action, and not sheer insanity.


The court hereby rules in favor of the plaintiff and awards the following damages:

• $100,000 to Sean for the amount paid for the destroyed stock
• $10,000 to Nylez for lost compensation

Stormeus
Chief Justice