 They would usually feature in stories simply as hostile criminals for Dredd to fight, but some stories set in the Cursed Earth would also show them in a more sympathetic light, as victims of unjust oppression by future society (or sometimes more directly as victims of crime).Initially mutants were mainly used in fight sequences in action stories, but as the years went by, and the tone of "Judge Dredd" stories matured to appeal to a wider audience, stories featuring mutants increasingly emphasized the injustice of their plight, and the harsh, uncompromising enforcement of the anti-mutant laws by Judge Dredd and the Mega-City Justice Department (for example "The Gipper's Big Night," (1991)).As time went on, the Mutant Segregation Act (named in prog 603) was shown to cover people who had contracted a gene-altering virus, dwarfs, and people who had even the slightest genetic abnormality, if they were screened by someone in a bad mood.