Red-handed duration was recently reduced from one hour to five minutes, leading to a lot of debate in the announcement thread, which can more or less be summarized as: "Red-handed disincentivized griefing because getting stuck for an hour is a pain, and now the game doesn't punish you for it anymore". The problem with this is that, as far as I understand it and is consistent with the rest of the game design, red-handed was never intended as a punishment, only a way to make retaliation more feasible, and in general the game itself does not judge crimes - it should be up to the players to enact justice, and ideally the game should only be facilitating the player's efforts to that end.
The reason red-handed was significant however was because players are not sufficiently able to enact justice themselves. The current scent system has three possible outcomes:
1) A nidbane is sent.
2) The perpetrator is found in the open.
3) The perpetrator is found inside their base/the perpetrator's base is found.
For all three outcomes, the result on successful retaliation is the same: Death of the perpetrator. (The nidbane can also leave some insignificant wounds, but almost everyone would consider that a failure.)
For all three outcomes, the expected result for a lower-statted player is the same: Nothing happens. The nidbane will fail to do anything, you don't have the stats to defeat the perpetrator in combat, and there's no way you're getting inside their base. Players can do absolutely nothing about crimes committed against them by stronger players, and the risk-reward ratio is bad enough that requests for help from stronger players will be rejected - nothing the weaker player can offer them makes attempted retaliation worth it. (Also a factor against this is that even the player asked for help may still be helpless against the perpetrator, and outcome #3 heavily favors the perpetrator and would take incredible effort from the avenger for an uncertain result (the siege may well be lost).)
Due to the current all-or-nothing approach to retaliation, it cannot feasibly be balanced in a way that justice exists for weaker players (it would be unreasonable for a two-months-old character to die for a crime against a character that spawned a week ago). As such, my suggestion is this: Add a form of retaliation that merely harasses, but does not significantly threaten, perpetrators. Technically nidbanes are this, but even in the worst case they only reduce your HHP by a bit; the perpetrator barely feels it. Why not hit them where it hurts? Allow victims to retaliate by inflicting debuffs, lowering their stats (by a percentage; absolute reduction would usually be irrelevant for higher-statted players), reducing their LP/EXP gains and generally frustrating them and thus disincentivizing them from committing crimes that don't yield any gains that would be worth the debuff (e.g. killing random newbies who have nothing interesting to loot). It would be similar to how red-handed disincentivized pointless crimes, but with the onus of punishment on the victim/avenger (rather than the game arbitrarily punishing the perpetrator) and without the stupid meta-aspect where you're forced to spend more of your real-life time in-game after a crime.
Lore-wise this could be implemented as a curse inflicted via a ritual at the runed dolmen (similar to summoning nidbanes), or perhaps at one of those recently added monuments (irminsuls and monoliths), with curse type and effectiveness depending on the resources used to inflict the curse.
Obviously, care should be taken in regards to balancing (you don't want people to easily stack -CON curses to easily kill someone remotely (in fact CON should probably be a stat that can't be cursed), but at the same time it shouldn't be so hard to curse someone that there's no risk to crime) but it would provide a more natural disincentive to crime and let players at least get some retaliation even if they can't seriously hurt those who wronged them.