#right now i'm honestly just going to vote counter-trend to try to keep it closer

[thinkin-bout-milgram]

More Haruka Verdict Thoughts

Sorry, I’m going to be insufferable for a while here while I’m trying to figure out my whole verdict thoughts.

T/W: mentions of suicide, serial killers

I’m still torn on the verdict. I thought I’d landed solidly on innocent, but I was talking to some people in youtube comments, and now I’m not so sure. 

On the one hand, I do believe that voting him innocent is the safest vote in terms of keeping people alive through the second trial. It’s more predictable, and it doesn’t risk harming his safe space or fragile mindset. 

However... I feel like if we vote him innocent here in the second round, we’ll be locking him into a guilty verdict for the third round. Even if I do forgive him emotionally, I don’t know that I could, in good conscience, clear him with an innocent verdict. Haruka shows, like, all the signs of a young serial killer, so I don’t think we can really release him into the wild without doing something about it first. Maybe a guilty verdict would be what he needs to correct his path.

But, if I’m right that he’s at risk of committing suicide if we give him a guilty verdict, then it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’d rather keep the door open for an innocent verdict than guarantee his death. In which case, I’d pick the safer option.

But it’s not a guarantee that we lose him if we vote him guilty. That’s just a theory. At the same time, we don’t know that it’s a guarantee that we can’t help fix his mindset if we vote him innocent. And, even if we vote him guilty, and even if he survives this round, we don’t know that we’ll be able to redeem him in the end. In that case, wouldn’t a guilty verdict be needless suffering?

Would Haruka even be able to succeed at a suicide attempt? We don’t know exactly how the restraining works. If he’s restrained enough that he couldn’t actually hurt himself, but he was still emotionally suicidal and had to sit through it, would that change my verdict, or would it just be cruel? 

I guess the big problem is, either way, we’re not going to know what would have happened on the other path. If we vote guilty and he commits suicide, we won’t even know what happens in the third trial. If we vote him innocent and his behavior and outlook opens and we have to vote him guilty in the end, we’ll never know if we could have changed the result by flipping his vote, if he could’ve been helped. Whatever happens, the result is going to haunt me if anything happens that feels like we got it wrong. And, assuming our results aren’t flawless, that’s going to happen.

Sorry for the rambling, this vote’s just making me think a lot.

-Venus