Title:___Death Warrant____________________________
1. Story Details
A secret court that issues death warrants. After the warrant is received the person has 48 hours to turn themselves in. Once people start recognizing the envelopes they stop accepting them. The warrants start to get placed in cereal boxes etc. Someone hacks into the court computer and the nine judges receive their own death warrants, ending the court.
2. Story Theme
Orwellian type story
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8. Publish Story
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Death Warrant
Byron Adler had worked for the Ministry of Justice for the last seven years. During that time he had entered the large marble columned building and entered it’s two toned green walls and headed to the stairs. The lime green over dark green bottom paint was supposed to mellow those employees of any excitement. Into numbness, Adler thought to himself. The old oak stairs smelled of generations of polish, smoke, and the weariness of clerks trudging to and from their stale offices.
This day was like every other day, as he walked to his desk. The same desk he had sat in from the day he was hired. Sitting on the far left corner, was his in and out box. The inbox mysteriously filled with files sometime between the time he left at 7 o’clock pm, and the time he arrived at 6:45 in the morning. He did not have to be at work until seven. However, he had learned that at 7:05, Jonathan Millhouse, his immediate supervisor, was asking for an overview of the files in the inbox. Five minutes was not nearly enough time to break the files open, much less appease the humorless tyrant.
The right side of the desk held a small cup with four sharpened number two pencils and four black ball point pens. Adler also had one red pen that he kept in his drawer for highlighting notes that Millhouse would dictate to him. In the drawer with the red pen, Adler also kept the stamps and ink pad. The stamps were simple stamps, with each containing a single word; Mercy, Confined, and Rendered. These were each euphemisms of the Ministry. Mercy referred to a prisoner being found not guilty. Confined referring to a prisoner being found guilty and Rendered, being the most perverse of all, Execution.
For the first three years, Adler had used Mercy and confined most of the time. Only once in those first years, had he had to use rendered to close a file. That fact had changed during the “week of burning”.
During that notorious and horrendous period, one hundred and ninety seven judges, and seven hundred and sixteen prosecutors had had been executed. A secretive underground movement, known as the Barnstormers that raided farmhouses and rural homes, raping robbing and murdering on a whim, had decided to protest the convictions of their compatriots. In doing so, they decided to execute any and all justices and all lawyers for the court. With extreme horror and precision, they carried out their task in one felled swoop. During the week of burning, a majority of the targets were killed in public, to include inside their very offices and courtrooms. The bodies were then set on fire, and left to burn. Most of the killings were done in the light of day, and in front of witnesses.
The killings subsided because the police were able to isolate a majority of the surviving justices and prosecutors, and whisk them into secure military installations. The Ministry of Justice along with the Ministry of Executive Council and the Ministry of Information Retrieval met in secret chambers to address this horror from the masses. In short order, the Court of Government Security was established. In order to prevent a backlash against the Justices and prosecutors, as had just occurred, the court would meet in secret. They would decide the merits of the case and issue either a mercy or a rendered verdict. Those that received a mercy verdict, could then be tried in open court, in front of a justice and jury. However, those that were rendered, would be taken immediately to incarceration and execution. The stipulation was determined that the subject of the trial would have to actually read the warrant, before it could be carried out.
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