If you kill somebody and go to jail for it for a while, and then -- via time travel -- you kill the younger version of them, should you be sent to jail again for it, or would that be double jeopardy
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I think the law as applied to time travel would require significant changes for consistency to apply.
First, for murders committed outside the natural flow of time, one of the consequences of murder should be that the Precrime Diversion Bureau corrects the murder by going back in time just before the murder and replacing the victim with a body double. Once the murder has been committed, the corpse is replaced with the original victim, and there is no blood / no foul. Now, if the murderer gets out of jail and commits the crime again, earlier or later in the timestream, they can be tried for it again.
It should definitely be possible for one to aid and abet oneself in the commission of a crime, and therefore to be prosecuted for such crimes.
I think the law should necessarily extend a special protection status to persons of significant historical stature. Even if time travel cannot cause a temporal paradox, the preservation of the historical record should be a matter of cultural interest, and hence those who go back in time to take potshots at Hitler should be prosecuted via special laws.
Now, I think it would make a fine story for a company to make a profit by creating a timeline completely separate from reality, and charge people money to send them back into that timeline to try and assassinate Hitler. It could be like a corporate retreat or a weekend warrior activity. I would like to write such a story on my journal; do you mind?
First, for murders committed outside the natural flow of time, one of the consequences of murder should be that the Precrime Diversion Bureau corrects the murder by going back in time just before the murder and replacing the victim with a body double. Once the murder has been committed, the corpse is replaced with the original victim, and there is no blood / no foul. Now, if the murderer gets out of jail and commits the crime again, earlier or later in the timestream, they can be tried for it again.
It should definitely be possible for one to aid and abet oneself in the commission of a crime, and therefore to be prosecuted for such crimes.
I think the law should necessarily extend a special protection status to persons of significant historical stature. Even if time travel cannot cause a temporal paradox, the preservation of the historical record should be a matter of cultural interest, and hence those who go back in time to take potshots at Hitler should be prosecuted via special laws.
Now, I think it would make a fine story for a company to make a profit by creating a timeline completely separate from reality, and charge people money to send them back into that timeline to try and assassinate Hitler. It could be like a corporate retreat or a weekend warrior activity. I would like to write such a story on my journal; do you mind?
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