[Renall]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

But here's the thing.

We were never told at any point that the Spectator's Authority by any means was honest, immune to lies/bias what have you, or whatever. Infact, the only use it has seems to be delivering information otherwise impossible to report, like recalling memories from alternate worlds.

One concern: How much does Yasu even know of Kinzo's backstory that Claire could have a biased opinion of it? When was she told and why? Kinzo seemed reluctant to share it at all until Will and Nanjo needled it out of him, and who else would even know?

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Then let's talk from a legal standpoint.

Suppose this case: there was a terrorist attack, a bomb exploded in a public area killing several people in the process. Two men are found being involved with this case. One man is responsible for acquiring the explosive, creating the bomb and the remote control, and placing the device on the site. The other man is responsible for pressing the trigger.

From a perfectly legal standpoint, do you think that only the man that actually pulled the trigger will be considered accountable for that massacre?

Again, it completely depends on intention. We are making the assumption that it was Kinzo who assembled, installed, prepared, and armed whatever disastrous thing is under the island. There are far too many nuances here to be sure just how much culpability is involved.

To use your analogy, let's say there's a third person in this scenario. This person is not involved in the conspiracy, but one day while he's in the public area he happens to find the bomb sitting in a trash can, fully armed. He does nothing about it, wanders off, and it later goes off.

You needn't debate his moral culpability in this case; he should have told somebody. The exact extent to which he's legally responsible, though, depends a lot on the law, why he didn't tell anyone, and whether he could have actually done any good if he had. Somebody like that could be charged anywhere from murder to manslaughter, depending on the circumstances. He could also be charged with nothing at all, believe it or not.

Now, since it's hard to imagine this is anything but grossly irresponsible on Kinzo's part, consider that we still aren't entirely sure how he died or if he was even actually dead, at least on Rokkenjima Prime. It's entirely possible he intended to disarm it, or tried to disarm it, or told Genji to disarm it and Genji didn't (which would shift culpability somewhat). It's possible it can't be disarmed. It's possible he deliberately hid it and told Genji not to tell anyone where the mechanism is specifically so it wouldn't go off. In criminal law terms it would be hard to tell, and with most of the evidence destroyed, if Kinzo just keeps his mouth shut like his lawyers would tell him to it'd be hard to make a case against him, even for manslaughter.

The civil proof standard is a lot lower though, and there's a lot of doctrines in property that may or may not apply in Japan, but the idea is that a person can be liable in situations where they may not be criminally guilty.

If I own property, and there's a dangerous condition on my property (such as a big open hole twenty feet deep with no guardrails), I actually owe a duty to anybody I invite onto the property (such as my family members or employees) to tell them about it if I knew about it. So if, say, Gohda's family is suing Kinzo's estate for his death, even if Kinzo isn't criminally culpable for killing Gohda, they can argue (pretty convincingly) that he probably should have told Gohda about the hundreds of tons of explosives he was working over every day which could go off at any time. They would probably get a lot of money from that, if the estate had any money left... which it doesn't.