Death at sea, old case files, and personnel records - 035

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transcript:

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​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Death at Sea, Old Case Files and Personnel Records. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode 35 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. I'd like to thank Gold Shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, Kate Wagner, Marco Carocari, Victoria Kazarian, Rebecca Jackson, Daniel Miller, and Natalie Maran. Your support keeps the lights on in the bureau.

Please support all of these amazing authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/35. And I keep telling you if you have your own author business, please consider joining Patreon. It is free for you. It allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro payments just like these patrons are doing for me. So give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, just visit writersdetective.com/patreon and that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

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​Can you believe it is already the end of March? Man, the year is flying by. I'm going to be sending out the March All Points Bulletin, the APB email on March 31st. Now, if you aren't on the APB mailing list yet, you're welcome to join right now. So if you aren't aware, the APB is my curated list of links to resources on the internet that I think you'll benefit from knowing about. And I'm not talking about like a bunch of affiliate links or books to buy or courses or anything like that. These are things like real procedural manuals or white papers that are going to help in your writing research or police discussion forums that may give you some insight into what a potential character of yours might be thinking.

So many of these links are actually ones that I find doing my day job, actually working in law enforcement, and so I squirrel them away all month along and then at the end of the month, I send them out to you guys if I think it's something that will tie into what you're trying to write about. So if you'd like to get those kind of things in your inbox on the last day of each month, you can go to writersdetective.com/mailing list to sign up. When you do sign up, be sure to check your inbox right away for a confirmation email. And once you confirm your sign up, you're going to receive the January 2019 and February 2019 APBs right away. That way, you get to see exactly what you've signed up for. And if it isn't for you, you can unsubscribe by clicking at the bottom of the email. I promise if you unsubscribe, it won't hurt my feelings too badly. So again, the link is writersdetective.com/mailing list.

Also today, I was one of the lucky I think 850-ish people to secure a ticket to this year's 20Books Vegas Conference, which will be held in November. And I saw in the conference listing in the description that they're planning to have a legal police procedural panel as one of the events during the conference so I am looking forward to checking that out. My favorite Cops and Writers sergeant, Patrick O'Donnell will be there for sure so I'm looking forward to catching up with him. And be sure to like Patrick's new Facebook page. You can find it at facebook.com/copsandwriters. He's another great resource for you guys. So facebook.com/copsandwriters for Sergeant Patrick O'Donnell's page. And I know he's got a book coming out soon. So once that's out, I'll be sure to have him on the podcast as well.

Anyway, if you are attending 20Books Vegas, let me know. We might put together some sort of meet up during the conference and I'd love to get a chance to meet you in person 'cause this podcasting thing is pretty one way kind of a communication form, kind of like writing most of the time. So let's change that. I want to hang out in Vegas if you're going to the conference. So let me know what you think of the meet up idea and send me a question while you're at it. Just drop me a line by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. All right, now let's get on to this week's questions.

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So my friend, Chris Niles at chrisnilesbooks.com submitted this week's first question. She writes "If a person dies at sea in international waters, what's supposed to happen? How much flexibility is there in making things more difficult or easier for my main characters? Does it matter if there's a body or if the body is gone, say eaten by a shark?"

What a whopper of a question, Christine. So there are a lot of parts to this one even though it was a pretty simple question so bear with me with this. First and foremost, we are dealing with a huge issue of jurisdiction obviously, especially when we're talking about international waters or the high seas as you may also see it referred to. So the overarching Law of the Sea Treaty comes from the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea. So we'll call it UNCLOS, U-N-C-L-O-S.

The US participated in the negotiation conference of this treaty, which took place over several decades and despite 162 countries and the European Union joining the convention, the US has not ratified the treaty despite bipartisan efforts across several decades to pass this ratification with the required two-thirds vote of the United States Senate. So despite our legislative ineptitude and political BS, the US still at least recognizes the Law of the Sea as customary, even though we aren't legally bound to it. We believe in it.

We just can't get our politicians to...                                                                                                                                                     Continue reading...