Apart from being famous for its tough folk customs, Ya County has no status in Yanzhou. Compared with the entire country or even Shengyuan Continent, it is insignificant.
Therefore, the demise of a small family in a remote area did not attract any attention.
In fact, Gao Mo's entry into Jingguo to set up the Severe Strike Division did not create big news immediately, but just began to investigate various cases step by step. According to Jingguo's current classification method, the Severe Strike Division is only responsible for vicious criminal cases, and civil cases are still adjudicated by Jingguo officials.
Many well-informed people have discovered that the Crackdown Bureau is only making a lot of noise, but is actually very law-abiding in its handling of cases.
The Crackdown Division is now mainly responsible for three aspects: first, major cases that have not been solved in the past; second, investigating possible false and wrongful convictions; and third, being responsible for major cases that are happening now. They are very organized in their work, which is quite different from what one might imagine.
As for the occasional outbreak of a few new major cases and the uprooting of some small families, they were nominally handled by Jingguo officials and had nothing to do with the Strict Crackdown Division.
Many people who paid attention to the Strike Back Division did not connect the new cases with the Division. They just thought that under the high pressure of the Holy Court, officials of Jing State had to make a sudden effort to achieve political achievements to deal with the Holy Court. This was a common phenomenon.
After a while, some people discovered that the Crackdown Bureau itself did not do anything earth-shattering, but after the emergence of the Crackdown Bureau, Jingguo had an additional department called the Ministry of Law.
The duties of the Ministry of Justice are relatively complex, including drafting relevant laws and regulations, being responsible for the management of prisons across the country, reviewing cases handled by the Ministry of Justice, participating in the trial of major cases in the Dali Temple, being responsible for supplementary investigations, etc.
The powers of the Ministry of Justice also quietly changed, becoming a pure law enforcement agency with the power to arrest and investigate, mainly to maintain the public security of Jing State. It also began to recruit military scholars, breaking the tradition of the Legalists monopolizing the Ministry of Justice.
The power of the Ministry of Justice was drastically reduced.
The original name of Dali Temple was just Li, and later it was renamed Dali. Temple is the name of the institution's residence. In order to unify the norms, Jingguo changed its name to Dali Department. The Dali Department's duties remain the same, and it is still the highest institution in Jingguo to try cases, and is also responsible for interpreting the law.
The Dali Ministry just changed its name, and no one cared about it at first. But after a few days, the change of the Dali Ministry of Jingguo became the focus of discussion on the forum, and its popularity far exceeded that of the changes in the Ministry of Law and the Ministry of Punishment.
Because, there are some more explanatory words in Jingguo's description of the Dali Ministry, that is, the Dali Ministry is nominally directly under the jurisdiction of the Holy Court.
From then on, the concept of the Three Judicial Departments did not exist in Jing State. All cases not involving officials were led by the Dali Department. Only when an official was deprived of his official position would the Dali Department be responsible for trial. The Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Punishment, and the Ministry of Supervision only assisted the Dali Department and were no longer one of the Three Judicial Departments together with the Dali Department, and could not conduct a three-court trial.
Many scholars smelled a conspiracy about this change.
The Dali Ministry is actually under the jurisdiction of the Jingguo Cabinet, but now it is explicitly stipulated that it is directly under the jurisdiction of the Holy Court. This means that if there is a conflict between the Holy Court and the Jingguo one day, the Holy Court can bypass the royal family and the cabinet and directly command the Dali Ministry.
This also means that the power of both the cabinet and the royal family has been weakened.
Many people even speculated that Fang Yun handed over the Dali Department to the Holy Court in exchange for the support of the Criminal Court in order to weaken the imperial power.
Others believe that the Criminal Court is using the excuse of Jing State’s poor governance to help Fang Yun carry out judicial reforms and suppress all dissenting voices.
Because a few days ago, some Legalist officials opposed some reforms and were directly called in for tea by the people from the Criminal Hall.
A few days later, the Legalist official resigned.
From then on, no Legalist official spoke out against it.
Amidst the turmoil, Jingguo's reform was proceeding slowly but forcefully.
When it comes to judicial reform in Jing State, Fang Yun did not completely copy the later generations, but reformed it step by step. As long as he pointed out the direction for the new government offices and new regulations, even if he did not need to step in himself in the future, Jing State would naturally follow the development trend and gradually improve in a better direction.
What's more, any reform approach that copies other political systems would be disastrous.
No country in history has ever succeeded by completely copying the way another country operates, never.
Fang Yun was responsible for macro-level reforms. As for details, Fang Yun would not only seek confirmation from officials of the Left Prime Minister's cabinet, but would also ask the cabinet and various ministries to participate. If any department strongly opposed it, Fang Yun would discuss it repeatedly or even suspend the reforms. He almost never did anything authoritarian.
Fang Yun respected all departments, and all departments also respected Fang Yun, which made the reform extremely smooth. After the restoration of rituals, there has never been a breakout of party disputes.
Officials who support the royal family have been obstructing reforms, causing some of Fang Yun’s reforms to be shelved, but they have no control over the general direction, especially when it comes to reforms supported by the vast majority of officials, they dare not come forward.
The Queen Mother had less government affairs to deal with, and she had more time to rest. Her health slowly improved, but it would take at least one or two years to fully recover.
When the scholars of Shengyuan Continent were paying attention to the judicial reform of Jing State, Jing State's crackdown was suddenly upgraded from the original crackdown on serious criminal crimes to the crackdown on bandits and highway robbers.
The scale of this crackdown on bandits far exceeded any previous one.
Each state has a university scholar who uses the power of the Holy Temple to patrol the world from high above. All the bandits who occupy the mountains or are large-scale bandits have been marked in advance, down to every individual. Then, the state army and the government army are mobilized collectively to start an unprecedented large-scale encirclement and suppression.
However, the merit of this encirclement and suppression campaign is not calculated by the number of enemies killed, but by the number of prisoners captured. The more bandit leaders captured, the greater the merit.
After the bandit leaders were captured, the Jing State military would send them away. As for where they were sent to, only the Criminal Court knew.
Regarding the fact that the Criminal Court and Jing State were joining forces to suppress bandits, there were rarely any dissenting voices on the discussion board, and everyone supported the Criminal Court and Jing State overwhelmingly.
A few days later, Wu Jun also followed Jing Guo's example and began to encircle and suppress the bandits. However, Wu Guo was still the same as before, taking credit for killing the enemies and not caring about prisoners.
The process of encircling and suppressing bandits is not an overnight achievement. After it caused heated discussions at the beginning, the discussion list no longer paid attention to it.
It was at this time that many small and medium-sized families in various parts of Jing State were destroyed one after another. This was because in the process of cracking down on bandits, the Criminal Court obtained conclusive evidence proving that those families were colluding with the bandits.
As a result, public trials and public judgments appeared again in various places, and people were killed in large numbers.
Moreover, the way these cases were handled was surprisingly consistent.
Any scholar suspected of breaking the law was directly exiled to Zhenyuhai.
All the main criminals were paraded through the streets to arouse public anger, and then executed in public.
All those involved in the case will be sent away.
All property will be confiscated.
All the land belongs to the Holy Temple.
All the fields of the Holy Court in Jingguo became pilot fields of the Agricultural Palace and the Industrial Palace, where high-yield crops such as sweet potatoes, potatoes and corn were planted. Those who farmed in these pilot fields were all prisoners sent from other places to serve their sentences.
At this time, except for a very small number of officials in Jing State who noticed the unusual trend, the scholars in Shengyuan Continent still did not notice the real changes in Jing State.