From the bounty hunter to the Pinkerton detective, from the "spend money to buy peace" to the "dead or alive" wanted, Arthur's troubles in "Red Dead Redemption 2" (hereinafter referred to as "Red Dead Redemption 2") are one after another, and the simple and rough logic of the game such as "paying the bounty is not going to jail" makes people wonder: Is the real West really like this?
Of course, the content of it is not something that can be clearly explained in one sentence or two, and in today's article, we will talk to you about the laws and people that are unique to the west.
<h4>Killing for life? No, just give money</h4>
In Red Dead Redemption 2, players can write off the wanted warrant they are carrying by paying a ransom, which seems like a bizarre arrangement, is there a historical authenticity?
The answer is somewhat subtle. In fact, the judicial system in the United States was largely inherited from Britain, and The United Kingdom once had a system derived from Germanic law, that is, the system of compensation.
As the name suggests, this is to pay for life: if you kill someone, you can pay off the debt of life owed to the victim's family. As for the price of compensation, it is set by the official system.
The original intention of this Germanic system was to prevent the families from getting involved in endless bloody revenge, bid farewell to the barbaric and primitive way of revenge of killing people to pay for their lives and for tat, and help everyone to unite and love and build a civilized and harmonious society. Otherwise today you kill my brother, tomorrow I will cut off your lover, the day after tomorrow you set up an Odrysco gang, the day after tomorrow I will also set up a van der Linde gang, everyone endless fire and ... Why bother? It is not as good as the unified pricing of various people and other countries, clearly marked prices, and Tong Sou is not deceived.
Comrades like Arthur Morgan would surely applaud the payment.
You may think: Isn't it possible for a rich man to kill people at will? Rich families, such as the two major families that spawned "Romeo and Juliet" in "Red Dead Redemption 2", can't you still cut me off?
Things are not so simple.
Life savings flourished more than a thousand years ago, when the social productivity of Western Europe was insufficient, and to put it bluntly, everyone had little money. The amount of compensation for life is much higher than the average person's affordability, and it is common for "criminals" to be unable to pay.
If the "criminal" could not afford to pay the compensation, he would collect a handful of soil from his house and sprinkle it on the three closest relatives of the matrilineal and paternal lines, and make them pay half of the payment. If he still cannot afford to pay, he needs to be brought to the clan's civic assembly to vouch for him.
It can be seen that the compensation for life is not only their own business, but even to pull relatives into the water, and even to alarm the entire clan, such a mobilization of the masses and huge compensation, or have a considerable degree of deterrence and punishment. More critically, it can make the injured party feel that justice has been done and the two sides can be evenly reconciled.
However, with the increasing prosperity of the extended family, the punitive effect and "leveling" effect of the compensation money have become more and more weakened.
Over the past few hundred years, the compensation has gradually ceased to adapt to social reality, and another kind of "gold" has gradually become apparent and dominant, that is, bail. The term has also been known to the masses of our country in recent months because of certain well-known domestic figures who have committed crimes in the West. If you are interested, you can search for "bail" + the names of certain celebrities.
In britain and the United States, as well as in many Western countries, "criminals" who commit crimes and face trial do not necessarily have to squat in the classroom, thanks to the bail system that is widely used in Europe and the United States. As early as before the founding of the United States, some British colonies had established a bail system from Britain — it allowed a suspect who had not yet been tried to pay a certain amount of bail to ensure that he would appear in court. In this way, the suspect can continue to "do wrong" before he officially goes to prison.
The difference between bail and life-savings is that it does not absolve guilt, but only allows suspects facing trial not to be detained until trial. As for whether they are ultimately guilty, it still needs to be decided by the court. More than a hundred years before the Van der Linde Gang ran rampant in the West, the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution also stipulated that whether bail was allowed for "potential death sentences" needed to be decided by a judge of a particular court.
This is fundamentally different from the people who killed half of the town in the game, carrying the bounty of "dead or alive", but still being able to erase the wanted by paying the bounty out of their own pockets.
Paying your own bounty to erase the wanted thing in the game is really just a game: at that time, the compensation was already in the past, and bail involved the final judge of the court, and there was no court in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2, so there was no need to make it as complicated as reality. On the other hand, at that time, police corruption in the United States was an open secret, and the boundaries between some gangsters and law enforcement officers were quite delicate, and sometimes law enforcement officers and judges were members of the gang themselves, and you didn't even have to pay, and your "colleagues" could do everything.
If the Van der Linde Gang also has such "talent", it can save us a lot of money.
However, it should be noted that neither the compensation nor the bail is officially amassing wealth. The compensation is paid to the victim's relatives, while the bail will go back to wherever the defendant appears (when, of course, is another matter).
Bail is thought to come in part from the life-savings payments, as there has been a similar role as guarantor in the life-savings payments. However, from the perspective of the principle of criminal law, this system of "asking for money and not killing" of "arbitrarily releasing criminals" is still based on an important principle of criminal law - "presumption of innocence".
The thrust of the presumption of innocence is that no one is considered guilty until a court has rendered an effective guilty verdict. All people, not even Dachy and Arthur, cannot be called "robbers," "thieves," or whatever; even if they are caught, they can only be called "criminal suspects" in the investigation and prosecution stage, or "defendants" in the criminal courtroom at the trial stage. They become "offenders" only after the trial ends and the guilty verdict handed down by the court takes effect.
The "suspect" we hear more often is actually a contradictory title in law. For if there is only a "suspicion", then he can certainly not be a "criminal"; if he is a "criminal", then he must have already confirmed the crime, and there is no "suspicion". This involves another principle of criminal law, "Never suspect", and if you pay attention, you will find that the term "suspect" is not used in the formal legal media and legal documents.
After all, under the principle of presumption of innocence and innocence, "suspicion" = "innocence".
In other words, even if a person does commit a crime, he is not a criminal in the period from arrest to trial, and he should not go to prison. You may ask what happened to the police arresting people? In fact, even if those people are "detained", they are not going to prisons, but detention centers. In britain and the United States, suspects can even use bail to continue to enjoy a certain degree of freedom, which greatly eases the pressure on official custodial agencies and ensures that the losses of the innocent are minimized.
So the next question arises: Since only a court of law can convict a person, how can there be a "dead or alive" wanted warrant in Red Dead Redemption 2? Before they can be arrested, they can be sent to the court for trial, so why can a reward be directly offered "dead or alive" for those who have not even been arrested?
In fact, compared with going to the post office to pay the bounty to erase the wanted, this illegal "live or dead" bounty is closer to reality.
<h3>Next: The bounty of "dead or alive" is a special existence</h3>
<h4>The bounty of "dead or alive" is a special existence</h4>
The purpose of the police arresting people is to "bring the criminals to justice" and to use legal means to punish the criminals, which can only be achieved by sending the suspects to court for conviction and sentencing.
And if a person dies, in most cases it means that there is no proof of death, and in some ways, he has escaped the punishment of the law. Therefore, when we go to the police station to collect the reward task, most of the time the sheriff will go out of his way to emphasize that he is alive.
"Catching alive" is similar to a hard demand, even if the bandit does nothing evil and the bounty is in the sky, the official still wants to catch alive. For example, the following Missouri bounty poster is aimed at the famous Midwestern train robber James Gang in the late nineteenth century, and the two leaders are each worth $5,000 (think about how much a carriage in the game is), but the government's demands are still alive.
But government departments aren't the only ones who put up bounty posters. Private investigators, businesses, and even individuals can make a bounty.
As far as businessmen are concerned, they are not so eager to uphold the rule of law in the country, but when it comes to self-interest, it is not the same. It is also the James Gang above, and the Central Railway Company, which is deeply affected, has put up a bounty poster to take down their big boss, and "live or die".
The problems encountered by the Central Railway are not isolated. With the penetration of the national railway in the second half of the nineteenth century (of which Chinese workers contributed a lot, which everyone can see in the game), the robbery of trains became a new popular business for outlaws, and the struggle between railway companies and robbers became fierce. The Great Northern Railroad offered a $30,000 bounty to the robbers. It says that even if the bandits are killed while resisting legal arrest, as long as you can provide evidence that the deceased was involved in the murder and robbery, the company will still pay the bounty in full.
Although this clever poster does not encourage the killing of bandits, nor does it use the words "dead or alive", the intention is already obvious.
So since the vast majority of the reward notices issued by the government will require "catching alive", what if someone "accidentally" kills the reward object in the process of arresting?
Actually, it doesn't matter.
After the aforementioned James Gang $5,000 bounty was issued, a pair of brothers in the gang, inspired by the righteous bounty, shot their boss from behind. What about bounties? The government gave them a lot of money, without dragging the mud and water. Thus, on the surface, the government offers a reward for "arrest and delivery," but in reality it is "dead or alive."
But the price was that the brothers were also charged with murder and were eventually sentenced to hanging.
However, these two "congliang" elements who betrayed the boss were pardoned by the local governor and temporarily escaped death. However, they still did not enjoy their old age, one of them committed suicide two years later, and the other was killed ten years later by a friend of James who came to take revenge. It can be seen from this that once anyone is caught up in the struggle between the western gangs and the government, it will be difficult to get out of it, and in the end, they will not end up in peace.
This is the wild west that the people who make people always engage in it...
<h3>Next: To "catch the live", find a bounty hunter</h3>
<h4>To "catch alive", find a bounty hunter</h4>
When Micah is rescued in Strawberry Town, Arthur claims to be a bounty hunter from Blackwater who is hunting down the Ordrisco Gang and asking the Sheriff to provide him with intelligence. Coming from the town of Blackwater, is a bounty hunter who wants to capture the Odrisco Gang... Arthur really wasn't lying. The sheriff, though unhappy, told Arthur some information.
The relationship between the bounty hunter, a civilian catcher, and the government police officer is more delicate.
Rewards for arrests have a long history in the UK. By the end of the seventeenth century, The British had established a bounty system through a series of decrees to reward the arrest and prosecution of offenders. This gave rise to a new profession, might as well be called "folk fast-selling", which was the predecessor of bounty hunters.
In the United States, this system was not only inherited, but also further developed. At the beginning of the founding of the Country, Americans were wary of government power. With the exception of the army used against the enemy, any organ of violence is considered detrimental to civil liberties. As for personal property and social order, it is considered that it should be maintained by the citizens themselves.
Of course, this is obviously a bit unreliable. In the nineteenth century, the United States began to follow the example of Europe in establishing a professional and unified police force, but only the big cities had real police, such as St. Denis in the game.
These urban police officers, now commonly known as "city policemen," are responsible for urban policing. However, at that time, the criminal investigation team of the regular police force in the big cities had just begun to be established, and corruption in the police was rampant, so that some local legislatures could not bear it, dismissed all the police, and started all over again. New York, Boston, and Chicago, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, experienced the dissolution of criminal investigation teams and even entire police departments.
But it turns out that how to rebuild is useless. In the 1890s, New York's commissions of inquiry gathered evidence to form more than 10,000 pages of "corruption reports" full of police scandals. Such a police force is naturally difficult to develop into a professional police officer with regulatory power in a short period of time.
Big cities aside, law enforcement officers such as the Sheriff Office in the countryside and the Marshal in the wilderness seem to cover most of the U.S. land, but in fact there are still large areas of "urban-rural integration" in a regulatory vacuum.
Even though it was already the end of the nineteenth century, the security forces in the west were much stronger than in the era of the westward advance, but the whole country still had the problem of insufficient police strength, and with the vigorous development of railway transportation, all kinds of people were also brought by trains, and social security was facing a severe test. Under such circumstances, if someone runs to the deep mountains and forests after committing a crime in the city, the government will have no spare energy to pursue them.
Therefore, due to the lack of government resources to handle cases, bounty hunters from the private sector once became a strong force for "doing dirty work", and bounty hunters and judicial organs "you arrest people and I give money" each take what they need for mutual benefit. After being wanted in Red Dead Redemption 2, Arthur was often hunted down by bounty hunters, and was only hunted down by government police in cities and villages.
But with the improvement of the national judiciary and corresponding legislation, the honeymoon period between the government and the bounty hunters is over, and the government has less and less demand for these "paid police officers". But bounty hunters didn't disappear, and after that, they began to be hired by commercial bail companies.
We talked about life compensation and bail at the beginning. As with the compensation for life, bail naturally has cases where the suspect cannot afford to pay. Although bail seemed to be a criminal system closely linked to state authority, in the United States (at that time) there must be a merchant when there was a trade. Faced with the social reality that many suspects are unable to pay full bail but still want to be "free", the American commercial bail company came into being.
Commercial bail companies hire bounty hunters because the person they bail out might run away, and once the bailee escapes, it means that the bail company's bail money will all be lost. Therefore, the bail company needs to "arrest" all the disobedient "customers".
Theoretically, in a civilized society governed by the rule of law, arrest is the power of the police, and private companies do not have the authority to carry out arrests.
But bail companies are different. The bail company signs a contract with the bailed person, and while the bail company pays the full bail on its behalf, the bail company needs to agree that the bail company will be given the right to supervise them and the right to re-arrest. This "criminal power" from "civil contracts" is supported by U.S. court precedents.
However, bail companies as businessmen are not good at arresting, so when "customers" run away, they find agents to arrest people, and bounty hunters are the first choice, after all, professional things have to be done by professional people.
But it's not quite right to say that bounty hunters are "professional." In the nineteenth century, bounty hunters had almost no barriers to entry and only had to declare themselves to be finished. So Arthur said that he was a bounty hunter sheriff and could not verify it, but "you say yes."
Yet even though many bounty hunters are untrained, their capture rates are staggeringly high. This is due, on the one hand, to material incentives, and on the other hand, to their "civilian" nature – laws restricting police rights do not apply to them.
U.S. law is much less restrictive to individuals than government departments. In the early nineteenth century, the court guaranteed the right of bounty hunters to arrest, holding that they not only had the right to make arrests, but also did not limit time and place. Later jurisprudence has even confirmed that they can break through doors without judicial process, without a search warrant, and can use lethal force if necessary.
Nineteenth-century courts ensured that bounty hunters had broad powers to take on responsibility for the arrest of escaped bail suspects that the police did not have at the time. It is escorted by bounty hunters that commercial bail escape rates are much lower than suspects who offer bail themselves. This commercial bail has now grown into a huge industry in the United States, with billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Of course, in Arthur's day, whether he was a policeman or a bounty hunter, Arthur didn't take them seriously. The only one who can clean up his kind of outlaw is the private detective who appears in the game with a high profile.
<h3>Next: To be reassured, you have to find Detective Pinkerton</h3>
<h4>To be reassured, you have to find Detective Pinkerton</h4>
Detective Pinkerton's appearance in "Red Dead Redemption 2" exudes an atmosphere of "I am a detective and I am good". They are the lingering nightmares of the Van der Linde gang, and from time to time Darchy will blow up his own huge bounty and be happy outside, with an arrogant look of "having the ability to catch me", but the arrival of Detective Pinkerton still makes him run away with a mind.
Detective Pinkerton also became a concern for gang members, and on several occasions traveling with his companions, Arthur was almost always asked about the detective. If you gossip, you'll see that Arthur will most likely ask if there's a Pinkerton detective nearby. Even while fishing, Arthur mentioned, "We don't want to go back over there anytime soon, Detective Pinkerton's patrol is already all over the tall trees and the Great Plains." ”
Detective Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century, was such a thing that terrified the outlaws.
In 1833, Francis Victor established the first detective office in France, and the private detective industry was born. But Victor's detective agency is still not as famous as its latecomers, that is, the Pinkerton detective agency in the United States.
Yes, Pinkerton Detective Agency's historical fame is thunderous. At that time, the territory of the United States was constantly expanding, and with the great increase in the mobility of people through the railroad, the crime rate continued to rise, but the public police at that time were very weak, forming a large number of "vacuum zones" that lacked police protection.
In such a "nobody cares" field, Detective Pinkerton has become one of the privatized "policing" forces.
Pinkerton Detective Agency was founded by British immigrant Alan Pinkerton. He was one of Chicago's first public police officers and a county magistrate (sheriff). In 1850, he officially founded his own detective office in Chicago, becoming the first modern professional detective in the United States. Pinkerton was marked by a wide-eyed eye, so much so that "Private Eye" later became another name for private detectives.
In less than half a century, Pinkerton's detectives have repeatedly solved big cases and become hot "detectives". One of the most legendary is the cracking of the assassination of President Lincoln.
When Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, a group of Assassins planned to assassinate him while he was on his way to Washington, D.C., and drew lots to decide on the action of eight Assassins, one of whom was Pinkerton's secret agent who infiltrated the Assassin Order. Lincoln learned of the intelligence and changed his itinerary and escaped the disaster.
Pinkerton also destroyed several notorious bandits, and banks and railroad companies sought refuge from Pinkerton's detectives. Therefore, in "Red Dead Redemption 2", when many police forces can't do anything about the Van der Linde Gang, Cornwall's finding of Pinkerton Detective Agency is a very reasonable operation.
Pinkerton has continued to this day, and their headquarters in China are in Shanghai, and they have their "rudder" in Beijing, Hainan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Of course, whether in the United States or in China, their roles today are very different. The turning point began in Arthur's time.
When he founded the detective agency, Pinkerton advertised in the press: "Do not accept bribes from either side, never compromise with criminals, and cooperate sincerely with local law enforcement when necessary..." But Detective Pinkerton has been accompanied by controversy since its birth, and Arthur said that Pinkerton detective is a "rich man's toy" and is not just his own nonsense. Detective Pinkerton did get into such a controversy at the time that it wasn't just outlaws who didn't like them.
At that time, some members of the House of Representatives said that Detective Pinkerton had become "a cold-blooded killer of a group of people in the country who organized to protect the capitalists." Arthur's statement is more elegant, and the main idea is still similar. Pinkerton, however, was a private company, and it was rightfully right to serve the wealthy. What really pushed Pinkerton detectives to the limelight was their abuse of violence.
In 1874, Detective Pinkerton was commissioned by a logistics company to arrest train and bank robbers, the James Gang mentioned above. Their "infiltration operations" approach, which they excelled, failed, and Pinkerton lost several detectives. In 1875, Detective Pinkerton heard that the James brothers were at his mother's place and surrounded a room in Missouri. According to Detective Pinkerton, they were convinced that the James brothers were inside, and they dropped a smoke bomb to force the outlaws to come out.
But this "smoke bomb" was actually a real bomb, which directly killed one of James's relatives, and also seriously injured the arm of James's mother, who had to undergo amputation, and worse, the James brothers who were to be captured were not there at all. The failed and violent attack provoked outrage throughout Missouri.
The incident was just the tip of the iceberg, as the "violent enforcement" of the Pinkerton detectives intensified in later years, until the gunfight that shocked the United States in 1892 led to congressional legislation against these lawless detectives.
At that time, a pennsylvania steel company suffered a workers' strike, and the factory owner arranged for more than 300 Pinkerton detectives to take a barge to the factory to "level" the incident. When the workers saw the barge coming, they thought it was a thief and shot at it. Detectives returned fire, and the two sides remained deadlocked for 12 hours. Eventually the detectives surrendered, and the incident resulted in the deaths of 12 people. This is known as the "Homestead Strike Case."
Both the US Senate and house have launched investigations into the incident, and the voice that "the responsibility for maintaining law and order should not be left to private hands" has received more and more approval. More and more people agree with the argument that a private detective is a necessary evil at best and an intolerable evil at worst.
Eventually, congress passed the Counter-Kerton Act, which prohibited government departments and the District of Columbia from hiring private detectives, and The Pinkerton detectives lost customers from the government.
However, the bill itself was the biggest advertisement for Pinkerton, and although the Pinkerton Detective Agency reduced its anti-strike business, it flourished in bank security and counter-robbery. State regulation of detectives did not begin until the middle of the twentieth century.
In the mid-to-late twentieth century, with the progress and reform of local police, the establishment of the FBI and the change of concepts, the positioning of private detectives and police officers also began to change. The police gradually took over the role of fighting crime, while private detectives increasingly specialized in security, guard and private investigations. The days when private detectives basked in the bloody storms of the wild west also ended with the arrival of "civilization".
Detective Pinkerton once told the members of the Van der Linde Gang that the arrival of civilization would put an end to these outlaws. However, at that time, he did not realize that the days of the detectives chasing the bandits were coming to an end. With Red Dead Redemption 2, we can get a glimpse into the legal history that characterized those Western eras. With the advent of civilization and order, the violence in the west has also come to an end, leaving only one legend after another.