Oh, also, it's worth keeping this in mind: In modern times, the White Lotus Society (for all that it occasionally still acts like it) is not an extraterritorial body. It has rules and whatnot like any organization, but it doesn't have its own internationally recognized code of law, and its installations aren't like embassies. What's more, Fort Tonraq isn't even the Society's property any more, it belongs to Korra - one of the two or three places in the world that are her own property as a private citizen.

What that means is that Cheong and his colleagues, if they face criminal justice proceedings for their part in this - which they are certainly liable to, having been accessories to, at the very least, kidnapping and felony murder (that is, murder committed in the course of another serious crime) - will do so under Southern Water Tribe law.

This is important because, for all that the third-century Southern Water Tribe is a prosperous and cosmopolitan country with a robust, globally integrated economy, it has its roots in a small band of people facing a daily struggle for survival in a harsh, largely barren wilderness, preyed upon by the wildlife, the climate, and more than occasionally the Fire Nation. Its modern criminal justice system still reflects the values instilled by that national experience, and one of those values is that the country really doesn't have the resources to waste on the maintenance of people who are a proven danger to the community, i.e., prison.

Now, that's not to say that the Water Tribes make a habit of capital punishment either. At least in the South, where times were tougher for longer, there is the aforementioned cultural bias against long-term imprisonment, but there is also the concomitant recognition that people, however unacceptable, are generally too valuable for the community to be going around killing them.

So generally, in the most extreme cases, when shaming or shunning or insulting songs (really, they have a tradition very similar to the Norse custom of flyting) isn't enough, what they would do is let the South Pole do the killing for them. It's couched in the laws as a policy of exile or banishment, but everybody knows that being banished to the icecap with little more than a warm jacket and your wits is a death sentence to all but the cleverest, toughest, most resilient folk. The unwritten understanding is basically that anyone who can survive out there without the support of the community deserves to.

I'm not saying that's going to happen to Cheong et al.? But it could, under the laws of the country in which they committed their crimes.

(N.B. All of the above is derived not from ATLA/TLOK canon, as such, but rather from the way things were done among the Canadian Inuit before the white people came, since the Water Tribes were based loosely upon them rather than, as is more common in the Avatar setting, the peoples of East Asia.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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