Ok, so Blaise gave von Karma the penalty, right? Which led to him killing Gregory. These events obviously happened one right after another.

Was Blaise there in the courtroom with him or something? It was my understanding that chief prosecutors don't attend trials.

The flashback scene in 1-4 suggests to me that their conversation took place in an office (after the trial).

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I think it's implied he was informed of what happened and gave him the penalty in his own office.

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I get that it probably happened in his office, but Manfred was supposed to be in a daze after being penalized, which led to him shooting Gregory. It was a spur of the moment thing.

Unless Manfred drove back to the prosecutor's office, got penalized, then drove back to court to shoot Gregory. Which doesn't seem likely.

Hence why I wrote "an" office rather than "his" office. It could have been somewhere in the courthouse where the chief prosecutor was residing at the time, some sort of chamber. Or it could have happened over phone - I don't remember how much we saw of anything in this particular case. It's worth noting, however, that Manfred never mentions anything about the earthquake taking place (he says the lights must have gone out, but doesn't connect it to the earthquake, at least not in his re-telling of the events), and that it "took hours to regain [his] composure" after being penalized, so it's a pretty large timegap between him getting the penalty and the shooting, in which he says he was in a daze, so either he got back to the courthouse in a daze, possibly without knowing how and why he got back, or he was hanging around in the courthouse for hours.

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Good point. I never considered the possibility that it could have been over the phone.

While not game-canon per se, Turnabout of the Time Traveller (a story being serialized at this moment in Japan) has a fairly detailed description of how the scene went. Gregory and von Karma were in the courtroom for a different trial that day (surrounding the murder of the titular time traveller), when von Karma was called away for an urgent talk from the Chief Prosecutor. It is suggested that the talk took place somewhere in the courtroom, though it is unclear whether it was just in some empty room in the courthouse, or over the phone.

The interesting about this story is that Gregory actually managed to point another instance of falsified evidence of von Karma during the time traveller trial, and was about to blow the whole deal up when the Chief Prosecutor called von Karma away for the penalty for the GK2-3 case. So von Karma was already chased up a corner that day by Gregory when the Chief Prosecutor gave him the finishing blow. This story also explains where the pistol came from, because it was actually evidence in the time traveller case, and was presumably brought in the court by Yanni Yogi.

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