Felony Misdemeanor / Literature

• Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The other "bad" kids are Spoiled Brat Veruca Salt, gluttonous Augustus Gloop, and TV-obsessed Mike Teavee. Violet's flaw is chewing gum at all hours, little more than rudeness and Pride with regard to her holding a record for chewing, but she winds up getting just as nasty a case of Laser-Guided Karma as the other three when chewing a still-in-the-testing-phase piece of gum turns her into a giant blueberry! Since the Turn of the Millennium, adaptations tweak the character to make her more obnoxious (and thus more deserving of her fate) — in the 2005 film and 2013 stage musical she's a Competition Freak, as well as a Small Name, Big Ego starlet in the musical.
• In The Da Vinci Code, Sophie Neveu is disgusted with her grandfather and has not talked with him for ten years. Why? She saw him having sex.
• In Les Malheurs de Sophie, Sophie is forced to wear a necklace of the parts of a bee she dissected until they fall off because obviously, that is one of the biggest crimes that a six-year-old kid can commit.
• In Black Legion, evil Chaos Marines and sorcerers Khayon and Ashur-Kai are absolutely appalled when they learn that one of the visitors at Gallium called his ship The Skinner.
• A short story by a local writer in Singapore is about killer hamburgers attacking the protagonist because he switched his favorite food from burgers to fried chicken. It's supposed to be a horror story.
• Discworld:
  • Men at Arms notes that Ankh-Morpork law has "a whole quiverful of offences available to a policeman who wishes to pass the time of day with a citizen, ranging from Loitering With Intent through Obstruction to Lingering While Being the Wrong Colour/Shape/Species/Sex". It's also possible to be arrested for violating the city's laws on being too bloody stupid (such as not running when a police officer starts lumbering toward you).
  • Later on, Night Watch states that during the really bad old days, it was possible to be taxed by the privitised Ankh-Morpork tax systems for things such as "Lookin' At Me, Pal".
  • Monstrous Regiment: In Borogravia, simply being a Bad Girl is sufficient to get sent to a Working School. And thanks to the country-wide insanity and the Abominations Unto Nuggan it is far too easy to be found Bad.
  • In Thud!, workaholic copper Sam Vimes is steadfastly unwilling to ever be home late for his daily book reading with his very young son, and in one scene his guards end up manipulating traffic just to give him a clear route home. Vimes does this— takes all possible measures to be home to read to the boy— to avoid a slippery slope; "If you start breaking the rules for good reasons, you'll soon start breaking them for bad reasons." So he will not allow himself to be late for his reading time with Young Sam, for fear he'll eventually stop spending time with the boy.
• Les Misérables has Jean Valjean getting 5 years for stealing a loaf of bread, definitely not something the author agrees with. Inspector Javert seems to approve of these. He is perfectly willing to throw Fantine, a penniless prostitute who is on her knees begging for the life of her child, into jail for six months on account of assaulting a bourgeois who had deliberately provoked her, and who is unavailable to testify.
• See The Scarlet Letter. It's a Victorian novel written about fictional Puritans. Most people forget that it's a historical novel, though, as the present becomes almost as far removed from the book's publication, as the book is from the time of its setting, and think of it as a strictly factual account of Puritan life.
• The Book of Lord Shang advocates punishing minor offences severely, the idea being that the punishments will deter people from committing small crimes and thus keep them off the slippery slope towards major offences.
• Dave Barry, in his 1987 year-in-review column, recounts a Reagan administration official's shocking admission:
  [June] 8—In the most dramatic Iran-contra testimony to date, Fawn Hall, played by Farrah Fawcett, testifies that, as Justice Department investigators closed in, she and Oliver North stayed late in their White House basement office and "colorized" a number of classic black-and-white films.
• In Oliver Twist, Oliver's famous request for a second pitiful helping of porridge is treated like a high crime by the miserly workhouse staff. "He asked for more?"
• For an epic example of Type Three, look no further than Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. The Baron sneaks up behind the beautiful Belinda and snips off a lock of hair - and this divides the entire court down the middle and results in an all-out war of the sexes (fought with fans and scornful glances). To top it all off, it's Based on a True Story.
• The Return of the Home Run Kid by Matt Christopher runs into this problem not on its own merits, but when considered in light of its predecessor. The focus of the story is the main character's baseball training under a fellow who was kicked out of the major leagues for betting against his own team and said fellow teaches dishonorable tricks like pretending to have been hit by a pitch. Fairly bad, sure? But in the previous book, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers, our hero used magic to ensure that he never struck out, and this was treated as entirely proper. Anyone who considered that poor sportsmanship probably wasn't still reading the books, and anyone who accepted it would have a hard time telling how physical cheating is worse than magical cheating.
• Alex and the Ironic Gentleman has the heroine spending most of the book repeatedly running away from the same implacable pursuers — a bunch of little old ladies who want vengeance because she stepped over the velvet ropes in a museum.
• The infamous tunnel disaster scene in Atlas Shrugged does this by claiming that every passenger on the train died justifiably due to their beliefs.
• The novel The Last Catholic in America has a scene in which the main character is despairing over his imminent damnation for stealing a dollar after being told by a nun that a dollar is about the amount that would qualify for a mortal sin. The priest he confesses this to disagrees.
• If you're reading a novel, short story, fluff piece or fanfic set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, you've got about a 2-in-3 chance of this happening, normally type 3 but sometimes type 2. Crowning highlights: a Guardsman is ordered to defend an outpost, but facing an overwhelming attack he pulls back and cleverly defeats them, only to be executed for not staying put and allowing the base to be overrun because those were his orders; a Space Marine stranded on a Death World is severely chastised for picking up an alien weapon and using it after his own weapons are out of ammo; any time the Eldar get pissy over the Imperium "selfishly" wanting to save a world housing tens of billions of humans they were willing to sacrifice to save a couple thousand (or less) Eldar.
• Subverted in Starship Troopers. An officer tells some officer candidates a story from the Napoleonic era: a junior navy officer during ship battle picks up his heavily wounded commander and carries him to a safe place. During that time all other officers on the ship are killed, so the young guy winds up a commanding officer on the ship—and, because he left his post, he stands trial and is cashiered (and is lucky not to be hanged). It seems a gross injustice for the candidates—but the officer explains that the punishment was completely justified: for an officer to have left his post without an order is really very Serious Business because if a sudden catastrophe happens, it is much more likely to disrupt a unit without a commanding officer.
• In a Richard Scarry book called Richard Scarry's Please and Thank You Book (covers proper etiquette) a mom absolutely freaks because her kid dared to ask why he had to do something as a bad example.
• Harry Potter worries this will happen to him when he blows up (as in inflates until she floats away) his aunt in Prisoner of Azkaban. As Fudge puts it, "We don't throw people in Azkaban for blowing up their aunts." While it's definitely not portrayed as a good thing, the fact that he didn't do it on purpose means they cut him some slack, and they were more worried about protecting him from Sirius Black at that point than anything minor. On the other hand, in the previous book, Harry was nearly expelled for a house elf dropping a cake on a dinner guest's head, and his aunt and uncle freak out if he even uses the word "magic" or references anything remotely fantasy-related, like flying motorcycles.
• Jeeves and Wooster:
  • Tuppy Glossop once tricked Bertie into falling into a pool, and Bertie's been nursing the desire for vengeance ever since. (A bit of Hypocritical Humor when you recall that this is the guy who pushed Tuppy's cousin Oswald into a lake.)
    I am not a vindictive man, but I felt, as anybody would have felt in my place, that if fellows like young Tuppy are allowed to get away with it the whole fabric of Society and Civilization must inevitably crumble.
  • In his very first appearance, Bertie is forced to face a judge who treats his having pinched a policeman's helmet while drunk the night before as an unforgivable sin and acts as if he's going to pass down a death sentence... before fining Bertie five pounds.
• Since Mommie Dearest is about growing up with an abusive mother, a lot of the things that set Joan off come off this way, including the infamous wire hanger scene from the film adaptation.
• Redwall: In Marlfox, in the C-Plot Lantur is trying to Mind Rape her mother Queen Silth by gradually making her believe the ghost of her dead husband (whom she murdered years ago) is out for her blood. The Queen becomes more and more paranoid and insane. She berates her rat guards for "Not protecting her" and then asks a random guard if he had seen the ghost, who by logic knew that if he said yes, she would ask him to describe it. So he says no. The Queen replies "Of course you didn't," berating the guard for not doing his job well enough. And immediately has him killed.
• The Vatta's War series: The Cascadia system features felony discourtesy. Seriously, their system is otherwise so lax that you could nearly get away with murder, but you'd damn well better formally apologize to your victim. After one character is convicted of an already serious crime, the punishment for it is never revealed because he backtalks the judge and is sentenced to death. Oddly, it's not really presented as a dystopia; the system is weird, but it works for the Cascadians. Also, the Cascadians are well aware that their social norms are weird by most standards and cut foreigners a lot of slack. The death sentence mentioned earlier was said captain's third count of felony contempt of court. That day. He had already committed a capital crime and been let off with a warning twice.
• Xanth: In A Roc and a Hard Place, Roxanne Roc is brought to trial under the charges of "obscenity against a minor". She's bewildered as to how this could have happened, as she has dedicated her life to hatching the egg of the Simurgh, the oldest and wisest creature in all of Xanth. (As it turns out, she'd uttered an extremely mild epithet, when she thought the egg was about to be broken due to a set of circumstances beyond her control, and the as yet to hatch chick was sentient enough to have heard it.)
• Edgedancer (a novella of The Stormlight Archive):
  • When a street urchin steals fruit in front of Nale, he grabs her. She panics, presumably noticing the utter lack of emotion in his eyes, and pulls a knife on him. He executes her on spot, stating that she has threatened an officer of law with a deadly weapon, and seems baffled when everyone around him is horrified.
  • The city of Yeddaw is famous for its ten types of pancakes, and Lifts makes it her mission to sample them all. Upon learning that the tenth pancake is metaphysical in nature - it's the ideal one left out to honor their god - she's appalled and threatens to call Nale to town so that he might execute them for false advertising.
• Going with Deliberate Values Dissonance in Victoria where the problem of Black crime is solved by making all drug or violent crime offenses punishable by hanging if the perpetrator is Black, requiring the trial and sentence to wrap up within a week with no appeal (or on the spot, for failing a drug test) and banning Black families from cities. Since the book is an explicit Take That! against all forms of liberalism, this works great and is accepted by all as a reasonable solution, particularly the Council of Responsible Negroes.
• In The Martian, Watney repeatedly states that he's not mad at Lewis for stranding him on Mars, as there was a violent dust-storm and everyone thought he was dead. What he is pissed off at her for is her terrible taste in music, leaving him with nothing but her collection of 1970's disco to listen to.
• Confessions (Saint Augustine):
  • Students from Augustine's childhood school would be caned by their teachers for playing games when they should be studying or learning, in the hopes those students would be able to grow up and get a job in the circus, gladiator arena, or the theatre. All of these being more advanced versions of the games students were playing.
  • According to a disgruntled former member, the Manichees would be willing to put one of their own to death if they fed a starving man an apple since the apple was considered to a hold a piece of God.
• 1-800-Where-R-U: Rob Wilkins is on probation for the first four books, and won't say why. Book 5 finally reveals that he and some friends were arrested for trespassing - they were swimming in a public pool after hours.
• The City in the Middle of the Night, taking place on a Tidally Locked Planet, is partially set in the city of Xiosphant. Due to their perpetual twilight, they have heavily regimented citizens' schedules, with set times for waking, sleeping, eating, working, etc. If you deviate from the schedule too many times, the punishment can be death. This includes sleeping at the "wrong" times. They essentially make napping and insomnia punishable by death.
• In the first Curious George book, George gets immediately thrown in prison for accidentally calling the fire department. However, being a monkey, he quickly finds a way out.
• Death Star: While treating stormtrooper Nova Stihl for unpleasant and compelling dreams, Dr. Uli notices that Nova has a higher-than average count of midichlorians, which is the only anomaly he finds. As he started practice before the Republic became The Empire Uli knows a little about midichlorians, mainly that most research on them was done by Jedi, who also had elevated counts. He also knows that like everything else related to the Jedi all information about them is severely restricted, but he's a good doctor who likes to pursue all avenues so he takes the risk and sends a query, giving Nova a prescription for sleeping pills. Months later when the query finally goes through he's arrested for illegal medical research at exactly the wrong time. However, this happens during the Battle of Yavin, and as they're close enough to the famous trench run a minor explosion separates him from his captors and he books it. Uli escapes with the other defectors during the battle and Nova dies covering their escape. Uli's probably still wanted for that research attempt afterwards, and much more for defecting.
• Justified in The Occupation Saga when protagonist Jason Linford is offered a choice between a jail sentence or enlisting in the Shil'vati Imperial Marine Corps after he knocked out an off-duty Shil'vati soldier in a Bar Brawl. The incident wouldn't normally have been more than a drunk-and-disorderly (the Shil'vati herself incurred Punishment Detail), except that a cell phone video of the fight went viral and Earth's Imperial governor doesn't want it to embolden La Résistance.
• Although some mothers required to complete the year-long program at The School for Good Mothers did abuse or neglect their children, others have ended up there for things like leaving an infant with a 12-year-old sitter or being accused of a drinking problem for wearing a waitress uniform with beer spills to pick up their kid.
• Something to Talk About: Emma acts like Jo befriending her sister Avery and supporting her struggling bakery through an investment are huge betrayals. Jo agrees, and the book's narrative does too. The reader however might be baffled as to why it's anything but at most a minor gaffe, given Jo was actually helping Avery. Emma treats it like they're in a committed relationship and Jo cheated on her almost. Jo feels the need to seriously apologize.
• In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Original Sin, a Hate Plague results in people murdering others for things like brushing against them, or possibly being about to give them a bad review.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: In "Nothing Up Her Sleeve" he second charge against Magdelene by the Council of Wizards is that she once "consorted with a bard" (therefore bearing a son he sired), which they think is a grave offense for some unexplained reason.