RE: Policy (Abuse reports and the rights of the accused)

In a recent post, Torley Linden stated the following (Which I shall paraphrase for brevity)

1. Persons acused in abuse reports are not notified unless action is to be taken.

2. such action can take up to 2 weeks to be decided upon

3. The accused person has limited ability to appeal, unless they can provide PROOF that the allegation is false.

4. The accused is never informed of the person who is accusing them

Simply put.. if someone accused me, let's say.. today... of greifing.. and 2 weeks from now I suddenly try to log in and am banned... Never having been contacted for my side of the story.. Am I EXPECTED to remember the particular situation that prompted the abuse report of which I was never notified? AND be able to figure out WHICH person it was who accused me, and what was going on? How am I expected to retroactively amass proof of my side of the story, while actually banned from SL? Even if such evidence existed 2 weeks after the occurrance, how could I access it?

I'm one of those "horrible" free account holders. I make a few things for sale, but it's not enough to break even. I've dumped about $60 US into my account in the last 2 and a half months, but I have no permanent home, no land.. nothing permanent. as such, I live in the sandboxes. I run into a LOT of people.. greifers, noobies, people on a bad hair day.. and conflict is fairly rare, but it does happen. misunderstanding occur. I've been accused of being underage, I've been accused of prostitution. I even got banned from a region for 30 days because I tested a push weapon I had built, on someone whom I had gotten permission from. (the tattler was probably an onlooker who never bothered to ask what was happening). Stupid abuse reports happen every day. I've filed at least a couple that I later learned, turned out to be wrong in fact.

But if the accused are not being notified, immediately, that their under accusation, and if the first they learn about it is when they can no longer access the grid.. how in the world can anyone be reasonably expeccted fo make a successful appeal? Do I need to be making chat logs EVERY TIME someone in a ssandbox gets upset and storms off? And what about someone who is greifing/harrassing via abuse-reporting someone they hate?

Justice involves being able to prepare a defense. In order to provide an adequate response to an accusation of wrongdoing, the accused MUST be given knowledge of their accuser, the exact nature of accusation, and the evidence against them. They must also be given access to gather evidence for an appeal, and in SL.. that means that they must be notified in an immediate fashion.

Yes, it's true, MOST abuse reports are probably just blown off.. and of those that arent, MOST are probably being executed fairly to people who have amassed a lot of reports.... and most of the people being punished are likely guilty.

But as you keep claiming this is a social simulation, and not a videogame... there needs to be a reasonable accommodation made for justice. One innocent man on death row, is 1-million too many.

Winter, your comments certainly ring through and sound like they've come at the midst of an active social discussion about "justice in SL"--having seen such things before on these forums and beyond, some things become evident:

* SL's Community Standards are guiding principles, but aren't identically parallel "real-world laws". Some would prefer them to be simpler, others want a more realistic law system and structure of government in here (another long-debated, very provocative topic). So, while fears arise, one doesn't need to have lawyers, nor a defense preparation in here! We can look up server records to determine evidence, and chat logs are stored for a period of time to verify.

* Seeing as how a "two-week response time" is going to cause anxiousness, even as we want to whittle that down, things are going to keep growing. The current model must change, must adapt; it'll break under strain if it doesn't.

* Ongoing patterns right now of shifting more abuse report handling to estates, and broader. Resident-run banning systems are on the rise, and some of them provide public reasons and "more transparency" as to why "Avatar X is banned from this land". This is *merely* speculative but: what if? What if immediate notifications were provided on a place called "Court Island", tended over by its Estate Owner and Manager which provide exactly what you suggest--a social simulation, specifically of certain legal systems (exploratory measures could be taken into various judiciaries around the world)?

So in brief, there's a paradigm shift in motion, as Lindens we'll strive to provide tools that make further emergent action possible... and things that apply to the current model may very well not in the future.