Full Series Jedi Legal: fair shake, or kangaroo court?

Do not mention that travesty of a film on this board!

 

I deep blue sea you think he's going to be a typical SLJ badass mofo character, and indeed he gives a rousing, bombastic speech in the tradition of SLJ speeches...

...and then a shark jumps out of the water and eats him. Doh!

 

I feel like I'm going in circles, but here it goes again. I'm not arguing that the Order had a duty to Ahsoka Tano as a sentient being who as such was due consideration/care by the other sentient beings on the Jedi Council under some galactic equivalent of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm arguing that the Order had duties to Padawan Ahsoka Tano as a legal member of their Order. They had a legal duty to provide her with a fair Jedi trial, and a moral duty to, if not publicly support her (though IMO they should have done that anyway), then at least not expel/repudiate her until the outcome of the Republic trial. They failed in both instances, thus showing themselves to be moral cowards more interested in the Order's public image than their duty to one of their own.

The Jedi Council focusing on the "greater good" at the expense of other considerations, among them their duty to Ahsoka, is precisely part of what led to the Order's inability to prevent the rise of the dark side, its growing unpopularity, its manipulation by Sidious, and ultimately its destruction. Yes, I am viewing and judging the Jedi's conduct according to my personal moral code. Because as far as I'm concerned, individuals and institutions that fail to uphold their own rules and live by the ideals they claim to espouse are at best hypocrites unworthy of service/support, and at worst corrupt and evil entities that deserve destruction. With its treatment of Ahsoka, the Order might not have fallen as low as the latter, but it certainly showed itself to be among the former.

 

Then what about their legal duty to give Ahsoka, a member of their order, a fair internal trial?

I said that the Jedi Council were legally and morally wrong to act as they did, and that their actions in this matter were indicative of moral cowardice, not of outright evil. Evil would have been wanting Ahsoka to come to harm/be executed as a result of the Republic trial. But yes, Mace Windu and the rest of the Jedi Council showed themselves to be bad people, or at least hypocrites who failed to perform their objective legal duty and (arguably) subjective moral duty toward a member of their Order.

 

But the Jedi are cops and cops have the duty to properly investigate in a murder case. You can't have the permission to arrest whoever you want based on flimsy evidence (the chancellor) without being bound to some duties as well.

The Jedi also state themselves that they are sworn to protect the republic. How exactly does that fit with "not properly investigating terrorism and murder"?

 

Obi-Wan was acting like a cop in the entirety of AOTC and later Mace Windu wants to arrest the chancellor. Only cops have the power to arrest others in real life. They are also the ones who lead official investigations when some crime happened (the same as, you guessed it, the Jedi).

I already mentioned how they had no explanation whatsoever for the terrorist attack and you still claim they've done their job! Do I really need to explain why investigating the reasons behind a terrorist attack on the temple might be important for the Republic? The evidence makes it 100% certain that if Ahsoka is the culprit she hasn't acted alone but was obviously allied to someone else. But did the Jedi council try to find out who her ally was? Nooooo!

 

The police is usually not beholden to the presidents orders (when it is usually something is very, very wrong). The independence of the three branches is important in every system.

 

Really? The Jedi have attempted to arrest the chancellor in ROTS.

 

Windu's choice of words is still telling. If you don't have the official power to arrest someone, then you can only kidnap him.

 

If they weren't obligated to give Ahsoka any sort of internal trial, then why did they even bother subjecting her to the obviously unfair, biased and meant-to-justify-an-already-agreed-upon-verdict trial that they did? It would have been much simpler for them to just declare that Ahsoka had been expelled from the Order, without bothering to explain/justify themselves. The logical answer, for me at least, is that they had no choice but to give her a trial in order to legally justify expelling her - hence the repellent farce of a trial they forced her to go through.

 

Which is not true. Nothing of what you mention points to Ashoka being innocent. All it proves was that Ashoka has been in a fight with another lightsaber-wielder; Ashoka had last been seen in the company of Ventress and Ashoka would have confirmed that she and Ventress fought, though she would be unable to explain the reason for Ventress turning against her.

So all that scene in the warehouse confirmed was that Ventress for some unknown reason turned against her “partner in crime”, which is not unheard of.

Now, Ashoka could have helped herself a lot by simply telling that it was information passed on by Barriss that led her to the warehouse. Instead she decided to protect her so-called friend even though it was clear that Barriss wasn’t going to help her even when she faced execution. That way, Anakin wouldn't have been forced to spend valuable time hunting down Ventress and the trial would have been over before it even began.

 

Ah, I think I see where we diverge again. To you, what the Jedi Council did was simply performing the procedure announcing and explaining their decision to expel Ahsoka from the Order. To me, it was a blatantly biased trial where, in a perversion of justice and fairness, only the evidence against Ahsoka was considered.

I've already explained this before - I do not believe the Jedi Council subjected her to a trial because they're evil and hate Ahsoka, but because they wanted to legally justify her expulsion from the Order and so only considered the evidence against her.

 

We know what their motive was, and it's been mentioned numerous times in this thread: they wanted to distance the Order from Ahsoka as much and as quickly as they could, so that there would be no public backlash against the Order for siding with/supporting one of their own when she's accused of a number of very serious crimes. The Jedi Council may not have wanted to expel her, but they did it anyway, in the name of PR and expediency.

 

They also completely failed to consider the evidence that cast her guilt into doubt. That's not the mark of a fair trial or procedure.

If they assumed that the Republic trial would find Ahsoka innocent, then they were IMO naive. The growing schism between the Jedi and the Supreme Chancellor, along with Tarkin's already-established dislike of Jedi and their ways, should have made them realize that the Republic would do its best to prove her guilty and give her the harshest sentence possible.

You say you'd get suspended, which is exactly what I previously proposed the Council should have done with Ahsoka's membership. But instead, they went much farther and outright expelled her from the Order. To use your analogy, instead of being suspended pending the investigation's result, your boss would outright fire you, with no assurances whatsoever that you'd recover your job even if you were found innocent.