Draft Ver 5.8.20
Draft Ver 5.8.20
Four substantive additions to Section 1 and the Statement of Intent — the indirect-process expansion of Battery (with three new structural subsections), the new Carceralism offense reaching criminalization of citizens in crisis, the operative-standard codification of Performed Duty with an Abundance of Care, and the constitutional-act expansion of the "evil" Construction clause in Cabalism.
§1.1.3 Battery — indirect process + three new structural subsections
The core definition now expressly reaches direct action or any indirect process, instrument, order, proceeding, referral, sign-off, transmission, or other intermediate means by which the same deprivation, restraint, harm, or violation is brought about in operative reality. Direct/indirect battery enumerated lists added.
§1.1.3.1 No Process-Laundering Defense
Paper, process, intermediary, court order, agency referral, automated system, or any chain of officials in which no single actor personally laid hands on the citizen cannot cure a battery. Every government actor who knowingly, recklessly, or with deliberate indifference participated in the chain is personally liable, civilly and criminally, regardless of the formality, title, signature, seal, court endorsement, or facial regularity of the instruments used.
§1.1.3.2 Predicate Required for Protective Deprivation; Liability for Downstream Harm Runs to the Harm-Causing Actor
Resolves the apparent "damned if you do, damned if you don't" exposure with three structural rules:
- Protective deprivation requires an elemental predicate of a defined offense (child neglect, endangerment, abuse, etc.), presently articulable on contemporaneous facts.
- Absent the predicate, there is no duty to act, and no liability attaches for declining. Speculation, statistical inference, and demographic association do not establish a predicate that did not exist.
- Liability for downstream harm runs to the actor who actually caused the harm — not to a government actor who correctly declined to deprive without a predicate.
§1.1.3.3 Emergency Exigency — Limited Carve-Out; Citizen-Defender Presumption
Limited exigency carve-out from §1.1.3.1's chain-liability rule, conditioned on actual (not pretextual) exigency, proportionality, contemporaneous documentation, and preserved citizen self-defense. The carve-out does not authorize use of force by a government actor against a citizen who is, or reasonably appears to be, exercising the right of self-defense.
The Citizen-Defender Presumption: a citizen present at the scene of active violence is presumed to be a defender or a bystander, not an aggressor, until contemporaneously articulable facts identify the citizen as the actor who initiated the violence. Not rebutted by possession of a firearm, demographic, dress, posture, expressive conduct, or proximity — only by direct observation of the citizen initiating force, or credible identification by another person at the scene.
Use of lethal or near-lethal force against an apparent defender, without first ascertaining who the aggressor is, is murder, not emergency response. Reachable as Battery (§1.1.3), Murder/Manslaughter/Aggravated Assault under generally applicable law, Carceralism (§1.1.47), Pretextualism (§1.1.32), and in operative context Terrorism (§1.1.12). The State's arrival at an active scene does not displace, suspend, qualify, or transfer the citizen's right of self-defense.
§1.1.6 Cabalism — "evil" Construction expanded
The "evil" Construction clause now expressly includes any act, omission, instrument, order, policy, practice, or proceeding that is unconstitutional under the United States Constitution, the constitution of any state, or the rights protected under §1.1.5 — including government conduct that abrogates, converts into a privilege, prices out, criminalizes, licenses away, or otherwise nullifies a protected right in operative reality, regardless of whether a court has previously so held. Ambiguity resolves against the government actor.
Statement of Intent — Performed Duty with an Abundance of Care
New section codifying the intended-deterrence framing and the operative standard that protects officials in good-faith compliance.
What this Act deters — every government act that:
- causes actual harm to a citizen
- creates a need for the citizen to resist
- produces uncertainty in any citizen whose life, liberty, property, family, or rights are at stake
That deterrence is the operative purpose of every criminal law in our system, applied here to government conduct that was previously insulated from it.
Performed duty with an abundance of care — the standard of lawful action. A government actor performs duty with an abundance of care when the actor:
- Investigates every concern brought by any citizen — door to door, in person, treating each concern as worthy of address
- Explains, intelligibly and in advance, what the actor proposes to do and why
- Understands, in advance, the actual damage the proposed action will do — including fines, fees, surcharges, costs of compliance, time burden, employment effect, family effect, reputational effect, psychological harm, residual collateral consequences, and downstream effects on the citizen's exercise of other rights
- Calibrates to the minimum necessary
- Documents contemporaneously
- Refuses to participate in any process the actor knows or should know is pretextual, fraudulent, fabricated, perjured, or constitutionally defective
The standard applies to action and to inaction alike. Officials whose practice already operates within these limits will find the Act unchanged from the conduct they already perform.
§1.1.47 Carceralism (Criminalization of Citizens in Crisis)
New Class 1 felony / capital offense reaching government actors who resort to carceral or coercive response against citizens without first performing the pre-charging crisis-inquiry duty.
Premise: government does not exist to criminalize the citizens it was constituted to serve; it exists to address the conditions from which the citizen's distress arises. Most crimes that come into contact with government actors arise from conditions human beings cannot escape alone — homelessness, hunger, untreated medical or mental-health condition, chronic pain, financial collapse, family crisis, untreated constitutional grievance. The criminal-first response compounds them.
Citizen threats or outbursts toward government actors are not per se terrorism where the citizen presents any crisis condition. The duty is to investigate and address — not to charge.
Trigger conditions for the pre-charging inquiry duty
- Hunger or food insecurity
- Disorientation (mental-health crisis, neurological event, exhaustion, etc.)
- Lack of income or acute financial crisis
- Homelessness or housing crisis
- Lack of medical assistance
- Chronic pain
- Constitutional grievance — including the operative-reality lawful-remedy test: a citizen has no remedy if pursuing it would force the citizen into financial insecurity, housing crisis, hunger crisis, family crisis, medical crisis, or loss of income/employment. The test is the cost of pursuing the remedy, not the risk of an adverse judgment. Deflection to "take it up with the court / file a complaint / hire a lawyer / use the administrative process," without first determining whether the citizen can in fact use the remedy without incurring any of those crises, does not satisfy the duty.
- Family crisis
- Service-connected condition (PTSD, TBI, chronic pain, moral injury, etc.)
- Any combination of the foregoing
The pre-charging inquiry and resolution duty (non-delegable, non-discretionary)
- Stop any contemplated carceral or coercive response
- Investigate the citizen's actual condition, in person, in the citizen's language
- Determine the underlying issue
- Connect the citizen in real time to the available resource — not by referral handed across a counter, but by accompanied transition where the citizen cannot navigate alone
- Resolve the issue, or take meaningful action toward resolution and continue engagement until the citizen is stabilized
- Document contemporaneously
Government-actor self-defense — retained
Right of self-defense against actual or imminent physical violence is preserved. Does not authorize: carceral response after the threat has abated; treatment of expressive conduct (verbal threats, raised voice, profanity, gesture) as if it were imminent physical violence; use of force against a citizen presenting any crisis condition where investigation and de-escalation would address the conduct; or any act of authority calculated or reasonably likely to provoke the very physical conduct the actor would then claim to defend against.
Acts of power that instigate violence — prohibited
A government actor may not perform any act of power calculated or reasonably likely to instigate violence by the citizen, escalate the citizen's distress, or cause harm to the citizen, until the citizen's immediate underlying issue has been investigated and at minimum addressed. The criminalization of a citizen already in distress, before the inquiry and resolution required by this section have been performed, is itself the act that provokes the violence the criminal law later claims to punish.
Republican-form requirement
A government that responds to citizen crisis with carceral process before it responds with actual help is not operating in the republican form guaranteed by Article IV, Section 4. Reachable under §1.1.45 cumulatively with this section.
Classification
- Class 1 felony default
- Capital offense where carceralism results in the citizen's death, suicide, serious bodily injury, child-separation, loss of housing, or loss of livelihood
- Capital offense, and agency reachable under §1.1.6 (Cabalism), §1.1.7 (Government Racketeering), and §1.1.45 (Non-Republican Government Act), where the carceralism is part of a sustained institutional practice