Judge Dredd

[Omni]

[float=left][/float]Location/Role: While his official title is that of ‘Judge,’ Dredd’s role is far more complicated than that. He is a combination of a Chief of Police, a Grand Jury, a District Attorney, and a judicial executioner. To sum it up succinctly… Dredd is the Law.

While technically the boss for Coruscant’s stormtrooper and space marine defense forces, Dredd abhors deskwork. He prefers to micromanage, and he often logs more hours in the street than most of his subordinates. Chance encounters with Dredd aren’t uncommon, as he makes little effort to conceal his presence even while walking the streets of other districts. It is said that, in one week alone, there were fourteen attempts made on Dredd's life during his street patrols.

Like most of Coruscant’s inner circle, Dredd is rarely seen below Tier 4, because his presence incites too much violence.

Story: In the early days, some of Coruscant’s more affluent citizens and bureaucrats questioned the centralization of so much authority in the hands of a sneering, somber, almost robotic man who has never been seen in public or at the office without his full gear (it is widely believed and accepted that only three people have actually seen Dredd’s face). Their complaints soon fell to the wayside once they saw the effect Dredd had on crime. Overtime, it has been argued (with increasing believability) that Judge Dredd is the glue that holds the Empire together. Without him as the unyielding, unbiased fist of imperial law, most journalists and academics theorize that the Empire would descend into civil war.

The exact details of Dredd’s previous life are hard to piece together, mainly because very few individuals have succeeded in ‘small talk’ with the Judge. What is known about Judge Dredd is that his previous world was one where society had been devastated by some sort of catastrophe, with most hypothesizing nuclear disaster. In Dredd’s society, ‘Judges’ had come to prominence prior to this catastrophe to deal with a society growing increasingly violent and criminal. In the wake of the disaster, the Judge ruled what remained of society, the Megas-Cities. Dredd served a cadet when the disaster took place and became a full judge years afterwards.

When Dredd arrived in the Omniverse, it is said that he remained at the fountain for upwards of a week. It is unknown why exactly he didn’t venture out like many other primes, although when questioned about it years later, Dredd stated that he had no purpose if there were no laws.

The first individuals Dredd met was Emperor Palpatine, who regaled the judge with tales of Coruscant’s granduer and elegance. Seeing that the helmeted man was unmoved by descriptions of the city, the Emperor took note of the uniform he worse and confided in him the darker parts of Coruscant. As he spoke of the crime and terrorism that thrived in the city’s slums, the Emperor saw that Dredd was interested for the first time. With a grin, Palpatine lamented that oftentimes Coruscant was a place where laws were ignored.

Dredd’s first words were quite simple: “I am the law.” A smile adorned the Emperor’s visage as he took the judge back to Coruscant. Within a few hours, Palpatine made a public announcement that Dredd was the new leader of the city’s stormtroopers and the space marines, effectively making Dredd the overseer of Coruscant’s police force and military garrison. On top of this, the new ‘Judge Dredd’ was invested with absolute judicial authority. The new appointment was met with widespread discontent among the city’s poor, who were often the most prominent victims of the city’s rising drug- and gang-related crime.

As the city dealt with the threat of Diablo, Judge Dredd crushed down on growing crime rates on Tiers 2 and 3. More than Palpatine or Bradley, Dredd became the face of the all-powerful regime that ruled Coruscant. By the time Diablo had been pacified, organized crime and major felonies had vanished from the upper four tiers of Coruscant. In the processing of ‘improving’ Tiers 1, 2, and 3, the Empire concentrated the most vile, unstable elements of Coruscant into the lower tiers, with Tiers 5 and 6 turning into living ghettos over a few months as any citizen with the means to do so fled.

While Judge Dredd desired nothing more than to purge the bottom three tiers of crime, he was held back by the Emperor, who didn’t want to risk the men and materiel to wage a violent civil war. Instead, they allow the crime to thrive under the assumption that the turf wars, greed, and hedonism will keep the seditious elements of society in check.

As time goes on, Judge Dredd continues to remain one of the more enigmatic individuals in Coruscant (and perhaps the entire Omniverse). In Dredd’s eyes, he is doing the right thing by upholding the law, even if the laws are set down by individuals with potentially twisted morals. At the end of his shifts, he returns to his simple apartment to sleep until the next day. Unlike many of the other bureaucrats, there is no evidence that Dredd is a malicious or cruel-hearted man. He is just someone who is excellent at a job. It just so happens that his job involves lots of people, many of whom who are only guilty of opposing a cruel and heartless regime.