No change indeed. I had forgotten about that one.
And yet it still feels worse here. Two reasons for this, I think. First, they escalated to an even harsher penalty for failure to plead guilty, and second, because in terms of air date this is 56 years later and attitudes towards prosecutorial pressure to get a pleading has changed.
I am admittedly basing this on The Next Phase, where Ro and Geordi stay phased without anything keeping them phased, and where Ro shoots Riker point blank in the head with a phased disruptor, and he feels nothing.
But now that you mention it, we would need to reconcile that, of course, with the fact that the Pegasus dropped back into normal phase when the cloak failed.
I had not considered a torpedo with an integrated rephase module. Maybe this could work (and there would be great value in a torpedo that phases back after passing through a shield bubble) but we don't commonly see torpedoes with deflector grids, cloaking devices, etc.
But I would concede there could be some interesting research here. However the Federation might decide not to advance it anyway as it's very clearly a treaty violation, whereas "ship that has good emissions controls and a finely tuned deflector grid" is not.
Yes it is indeed a copy of the modern system. I just expect Starfleet to be better. Traditionally messed up justice systems have been the domain of some Hat Planet.
But Starfleet looking less optimistic and rosy has been a general push for a while.