Chapter 257: Legal Reforms (1/2)

After getting a good night's sleep, Berengar awoke the next day, and after having his morning tea, he immediately thrust himself into his work. For starters, he had begun to refine the legal system of the Duchy of Austria. Berengar was of the mindset that crime could not be tolerated, whether from the perspective of the law or within a community.

To Berengar, the level of crime that existed within a community was whatever the people within it were willing to tolerate. He planned to expand legal reforms and included propaganda to inspire communities to report crimes to their nearest official.

As such, he was in the process of designing comprehensive legal reforms. Though crime in itself was rare in Tyrol and especially within the city of Kufstein, it had begun to become widespread throughout much of Austria, and not just minor offenses either.

The devastation caused in the wake of the Bavarian Occupation resulted in thousands of peasants fleeing to the cities' sanctuary. In their desperation, these peasants turned to crime to survive, which in turn lead to the creations of Criminal Syndicates that had begun to pop up across the more impoverished regions of Austria.

Because of this, Berengar had started his legal reforms with strict countermeasures to Organized Crime. Any person convicted of a crime who was determined to be associated with a Criminal Syndicate recognized by the Department of Intelligence's Internal Service was to be sentenced to death by firing squad.

The Criminal Syndicates were still in their infancy. Thus they had yet to entrench themselves in the critical sectors of society. Berengar fully intended to route them out and destroy them from the roots to the stem. He refused to allow businesses and politics to tie themselves to criminal syndicates like in his previous life.

Thus even if someone committed a non-violent misdemeanor like fraud or theft, so long as they had ties to any known Criminal Syndicate, they would be sentenced to death. It was cruel, but Berengar had seen the rise of Narco States in his past life and desired to end such a possibility before it had a chance to become a reality.

Gangsters were the first among the people who would be sentenced to death under this new system; other heinous crimes such as Murder, Kidnapping, and Rape were also deemed worthy of such a punishment.

As for Child Molesters, Berengar had a special hell intentionally designed for them; they would be castrated and then sentenced to indentured servitude. They would engage in hard labor for the remainder of their miserable existence. If they dropped dead from over-exhaustion, Berengar did not care; that was just one less mouth to feed.

To make his stance clear, a strict federal age of consent was applied at the age of 16; any adult caught having sexual relations with a minor would be tried as a child molester, and if convicted, sentenced to the punishment mentioned above.

Every other violent crime had a sentence varying from 3 years to life in prison, depending on the severity of the crime. Berengar intended to construct labor camps to act as the prisons in his society.

The convicted criminals would pay off their debt to society with physical labor, usually in the form of dangerous jobs that provided significant risks to the civilian population or monumental projects like canals and road building.

There was a three-strike rule in place for this system when it came to felonies of all kinds. If convicted three times of a felony, they would be sentenced to death, just like the gangsters, murderers, kidnappers, and rapists.

In this court system, if one were sentenced to death, they would be allowed a single appeal to the courts. In doing so, the crime would be re-investigated, and if the criminal were found innocent of the crime, they would be released from their sentence.

However, if determined guilty after a single appeal, they would immediately be executed by firing squad. Berengar had seen taxpayers' money wasted on keeping criminals who were clearly guilty but awaiting their seventh appeal alive during his past life.

To him, a second chance at a trial was fair enough; after that, if they were still determined to be guilty, there was no point keeping such monsters alive; it was an absolute waste of resources. For Berengar, mismanagement of the finite resources on this Earth was a grave sin, and he had no desire to provide food and water to a criminal while it could be given to a starving child instead.