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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 4935756" data-attributes="member: 16760">Legal Status of Non-HumansThe legal status of nonhumans remained fuzzy for over forty years after the first satyrs breached the Earth dimension.  But the landmark 1972 Supreme Court decision Louisiana vs. Sssthokrraal finally gave some clarity to the matter.Sssthokrraal was a dimensional traveller whose equipment malfunctioned and accidentally landed him in a Louisiana swamp.  Unfortunately for him, his own crocodilian race bore too close a resemblance to the iguanoid Hissies for comfort, so soon after the war.  Upon making his way to the nearest town, a panicked mob formed and attacked him.  Sssthokrraal did not fight back for as long as his body armor protected him, but once he became injured he defended himself, killing one human.  He cooperated with law enforcement when they arrived, though communicating with each other was a challenge. (Eventually a telepath was able to make preverbal contact and establish ties.)The state argued that Sssthokrraal, not being human, did not and could not have 'human rights', and sought to put him down as a 'dangerous monster'.  An appellate court upheld that status, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.  Through all this, Sssthokrraal cooperated fully and retained his good humor and good will toward the strange apelike beings who were trying him.  Popular opinion started to sway in his favor.Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that 'any living creature capable of speaking for itself' was a person under the law and entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as any foreign national.  (Or American citizen, if natural-born or naturalized.)  Sssthokrraal was permitted to repair his dimensional equipment (with help from several gadgeteers) and return home.This decision greatly clarified the situation in general, but in 2008 several legal issues remain in question regarding those non-human beings who are not 'living creatures'.The undead have been lobbying off and on for legal protection for decades, to little avail.  In 1981, a man was tried for staking a vampire in its coffin who had murdered and turned several of his relatives.  The court ruled that Sssthokrraal did not apply to the undead, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case.  In 2008, there is an uneasy understanding that law-abiding undead beings have many of the same rights as living humans - certainly they cannot be destroyed out of hand.  But governments generally do not press charges against anyone who destroys an undead guilty of violent crime.Since undead are not 'alive', and indeed are not considered 'persons' in the full legal sense, destroying one cannot be prosecuted as 'murder' in any event.  However, prosecutors have come up with any number of alternative ways to charge humans who cross the line.  In a notorious 1994 case in which a peaceable vampire was staked by a zealot, the man was put away for life on multiple aggravated assault charges.  (The joke at the time was that it was one charge for each blow of the hammer.)Vampires in particular cause legal headaches, because many versions of them possess mental powers.  There is no difference in principle between their powers and those of, say, telepaths... but since the legal standard is to treat mental assault as equivalent to physical, this means that a vampire using hypnosis, say, can find itself stripped of legal protection.Artificial intelligences are an entirely separate matter.  There aren't very many of them, and only very few are publicly known to exist.  (Most are top-secret military or corporate projects.  X-97 Alpha is quite unusual in being neither.)  There simply is as yet no body of legal opinion on them, and so the field is wide open.</blockquote>

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