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My punding trial for reckless endangerment has made me less a wreck than the recipient of sympathetic (simply pathetic) overtures from around the world, not the least from the land down punder. That lowest of all possible friends, my Pun Pal, has respunded in kind:
The fishious attucks on you are punardonable. These puns may be a stretch, but soon you may be doing a stretch at the State Pun, where no puns are pardoned.
I should know, having spun my wheels there for a year. The charge? I had written a well-concealed pun but was caught because someone had read between the lines.
I was a copywriter for an ad agency and had written the following:
Try All
the ways of purchasing Product X but
Buy
the thing before it's too late
Or Deal
directly with the manufacturer.
Now, you'll have to deal with trial by jury.
Which reminds me. I was teaching World Cultures to 10th grade students. Third period, midway between lunch and breakfast. The kids were always asking to go to the lavatory. I said to them: what the heck do you think this is, “you're a peein'” history. But if they really had to go, I said, fine, go and forever hold your pees. Not that I could stand the teenage brats; I figured I’d give them enough of Europe and they'd get the hang of it themselves.
My Pun Pal jests about trials by jury and ordeal. Like everyone else, he figures the Sardine's looking forward to his day in court. Guess again. The Sardine's scared.
What faith has he shown in humanity thus far to warrant the thought that he would want his future determined by an offshoot of the Logged-In Public?
L-I P: You don't think we can judge your case impartially.
Not even partially unprejudiced. I'd sooner leave his fate to a flip of a coin than to the public’s unreasoned judgment.
L-I P: That's no way to get us on your side.
Drop me in a pool of water and if I float I'm innocent; sink, I'm guilty. Take me to the English Channel and swim to France. Sink or swim again.
"Yeah, if I'm not able to pick up a girl at the bar tonight, I should be found guilty of cheating on my income taxes," Joe T. comments.
Certainly. Why not create a system of mental and physical challenges that have fair and reasonable degrees of success or failure commensurate with the evidence against one in the case? How well you shoot a bow and arrow at a target. Matching shots in basketball with a high school, college, or pro player, depending on the case. This kind of trial would eliminate appeals unless someone finds fault with the nature of the contest. But, then, you'll never please everyone.
"I don't think it would work," says McNulty, whom is representing the Sardine.
A lawyer wouldn't, of course. Generally, other people would resist this new old form of justice because it would mean overthrowing a system we're all used to. Why not start it on a voluntary basis and see how it would work? You would think that a guilty person would opt for this kind of trial, that it would be the easy way to avoid punishment. That's the chance both sides take with this system. It's a matter of trusting the way things turn out versus trusting the reasonable judgment of twelve insufficiently evolved apes.
L-I P: Do you want us to beat the crap out of you? You're hurting our feelings.
To guard against the guilty people who would abuse the system (we'd have to modify the "innocent until proven guilty" to "possibly but not definitively guilty until proven innocent"), a feat or ordeal would have a specific degree of difficulty. For example, if the crime has an eyewitness, the ordeal would be difficult; two or more witnesses, and the ordeal's difficulty increases exponentially. Circumstantial evidence might increase the difficulty of the ordeal to the weight of one eyewitness testimony. A new breed of clerks would be trained to gauge the degrees of ordeal. Repeat offenders would also have a higher degree of difficulty.
What one can question is the modern prejudice that a rational mankind exists to be plugged into a system of fair and equal justice. When the barbarians used trial by ordeal, they had a dim view of human nature. They looked around and saw. . . barbarians. Nature was exalted above all things. Trust in the nature of life allowed them to equate justice with the outcome of a joust, that a great truth was inherent in the outcome of a contest. More truth than you would find in the harangues of lawyers and the tears of the victims.
The L-I P: Would you take trial by ordeal as the way to resolve your own case?
If I could petition the judge to arrange something. Don't they allow small claims cases to go to a People's Court on television?
"That's one of my favorite shows," says Frank Weathers.
"That's the one I couldn't think of," says McNulty, "Frank's little social pet."
Maybe the judge could ask a simple question, one that Health Utopians could not object to. If the Sardine knows it, he goes free.
L-I P: Like what?
What's my blood type?
L-I P: You might know that.
That's what would make trial by ordeal interesting. The risk factor. Does the Health Utopia want to take a chance that I would or would not know something like that?
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.