The High Court was in session. The case of ‘Arthur v. the Crown, the Sovereign State and all Residents Thereof’ was progressing through another day of legal sumo-wrestling. The charge against the accused Mr Rory Arthur was that he deliberately and with malicious aforethought conspired to overthrow the state in a wanton and reckless act of misguided revolutionary intent. The fact of the matter was, however, that the case had been seen in session for close to 2 years, with the actual specifics of the charge against him constantly evolving and shifting with the slow ambling of tectonic plates making it actually impossible to notice with naked eyes.
In fact as Rory sat in the gold-gilded dock and stared blankly out into the packed spectator’s gallery, he could barely even recall the initial charge that he was handed or even the fine details of what relevance it had to him. Poor Rory had only gone down the road to buy the Sunday papers from the local newsagent when riot police and squad cars seemed to dissolve into reality like a harsh mirage; arresting everyone in the shop, including old Mr Khan the owner, who broke down into hysterical wailing and weeping as black-uniformed officers like state sentinels dragged him by his flailing limbs out to the van. Rory wondered what significance he had to the whole thing anyway and even if anyone here knew of Mr Khan or what precise charge he was being tried on.
His defence lawyer was certainly of no use to him since he spent the whole time either unconscious or otherwise completely drunk; dribbling and slavering all over the bench. He would occasionally cry out “Objection!” at some seemingly random point in the prosecutor’s year-long sprawling account of case details, precedents and legal history, before then slumping back in his seat, robes and wig dishevelled and dirty. Rory tried to swing his heavy head away from the packed auditorium to tune in to what the tall wiry prosecutor with a long hooked nose and spectacles was actually saying.
“...referral to subsection 3.9 category A20 of the Terms and Conditions for Management of Work, Trade and Commerce, I would like to draw your attention to Exhibit 9371 which justifies the sine qua non as entirely of jurisdictional merit...”
He would direct this monotonous and never-ending diatribe of stiff legalese to the twelve jury members – all suitably horrified individuals, gasping and whispering behind hands in all the apparently correct places at which to register such disgust. Men and women with identical stress-fractured faces, huge bruised bags of flesh swinging under their eyes and lines gorged into their brows; mere parasites to the media who fed them forkfuls of half-baked information and facts by the day.
“...and this does in fact refer to the Environment of Information and Deception Legislature...”, he could imagine the prosecutor having sex with his wife in the same rigid-upper lipped manner at which he addressed his spiel to the courthouse; sifting through vast ledgers of archive papers and files. “...strictly in accordance with the actus reus that is under scrutiny as seen in the case precedent...”, the team of court clerks furious in their scribbling down of every word, each finished page being thrust aside to join the mountain of papers slowly disintegrating to dust under the wooden desks.
The Master of the Rolls was a repulsive fat mollusc of a man, sweating profusely in his legal gowns as he sat on the bench below the judge. He was supposedly keeping an eye over the proceedings but did nothing more than sigh heavily and clock-watch for his hourly hampers of steaming pies and other baked goods to be delivered to the courtroom. He would devour them all in minutes, without even noticing the delicious aromas provoking the famished audience into a football-crowd delirium. For the rest of the time he would flick through pornographic magazines discreetly concealed within a dusty volume, his multitude of rosy chins shimmering as his eyes did feast upon such glorious fantasies of the flesh.
And so this did continue on and on, a prolonged carnival of boredom punctuated by intermittent nightfall. Until one day, totally out of the blue, the prosecutor’s last witness was carted out of the court, his summing up complete, and the defence was left to awkwardly stammer through an ill-prepared closing speech that seemed to have been devised on random scraps of paper and cigarette packets as the drunkard propped himself up on the table to slur his way to a nonsensical conclusion. The jury took barely minutes to deliberate their verdict before returning. Perhaps filled with such a desperate desire to escape their own sentence and rejoin the rest of society, to pick up the threads of their own lives. Children that had now finished school, or had maybe even died without their noticing and spouses to be reigned-in who had long since strayed away from home.
As guilty was called out the courtroom went wild – the crowd whooping and hollering as if their team had scored a winning goal, hugging and jubilation danced in the air. It was so infectious that even old Rory Arthur was grinning along. The judge, his face frozen into a sour gargoyle mask of wrinkles beneath his long flea-bitten wig, battered his gavel against his bench for the first time during the whole trial – for never had there been such mayhem erupt – and tapped snuff into his nose as he did habitually throughout each day.
“The court of the land has rested on a verdict. Will the defendant please stand.” All eyes navigated their way to the defendant as if just remembering that there was one present, as Mr Arthur stood passive and vacant in the dock.
“Mr Archer, it is this court’s decision that you are to be found guilty of the highest order of treason and mischievousness and therefore I can only suggest one suitable sentence. It is for your callous and reckless aforethought and malicious intention to meet wicked ends that you shall be taken down and away from this place to a particularly foul prison steeped in degradation where you shall spend an eternity being sodomised by delinquents and dope fiends. For a man of such principles and unjust pride, the shame of having each and every orifice ritually plundered and your soul pillaged for such depraved pleasures will be a fair punishment and in my opinion is entirely justified. Take him down!”
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