• “My words in this courthouse will only be what they are.” A man acting as his own defense council said to the jury in his opening statement. “You’ll interpret this as sedition if you will, or you’ll think of it as something else according to how your mind deems it. But to me, this trial is an opportunity to share my truth. I suppose that I’m probably signing my own death warrant. By a paradox, your finding me not guilty would be solid evidence of my guilt because convincing you of my innocence might only be accomplished by my making seditious seeming statements.”

    Then the accused alien turned sharply on the heel of his wheelie sneaker, and glided on back to his seat at the defense table. “I’m done,” he said to the prosecutor.

    “This young man who stands accused,” the government lawyer orated in his turn, “has brought it all onto himself.” He went on to describe the alien’s actions of going to a police station and trying to incite them into rebelling against the government’s authority. “Neither the police nor the district attorney’s office had any option but to bring this charge, because he was continuing to commit sedition in both the police station and in all subsequent interviews with him.”

    “Calling the accused as a prosecution witness is highly irregular,” the judge stated for the record: his main concern wasn’t for how injurious the defendant’s testimony might be to his own case, but rather in preventing an appeal from besmirching his judicial reputation, “but as the defendant has requested it, I’ll allow it.”

    “I do.” The witness answered the swearing question in regarding telling no lies. Then he added in an undertone. “But the whole truth, is far more truth, than a law court is able to contend with.”

    “You’re an alien.” The prosecutor began. “Why would you choose to practice your sedition here, in a state that isn’t your own and which employs the death penalty?”

    “First, I’m not an alien. By definition, an alien belongs to another nation and I don’t ‘belong’ to any states. I am simply a soul living on the earth that god supplied. This means I’m equally at home, anywhere on this planet. Or perhaps we can all be called aliens of the extraterrestrial type: my death experience showed me that I, and all of us, come from a place existing in a gap between matter and time.” The young man then pointedly directed his next words at the judge. “The truly ‘alien’ notion is that drawing a border around a portion of a map and arbitrarily giving it a name, causes the soil to magically come to life with the authority to rule all venturing onto it. That is a bizarre, deceptive and harmful concept that we should rebel against and I’ll do it openly. I am not a slave, nor is my body owned by animated dirt!”

    “I’ll have no seditious talk in my court!” The judge hammered his gable.

    “The ‘state’s authority’ is a piñata that exists only in your skewed vision of reality.” The defendant ignored the magistrate’s outburst. “I tell people they would be better off being free and your mind’s eye interprets my words as being a fiesta stick aimed at damaging a fictional papier-mâché treasure trove.”

    “Which like Pandora’s box,” the judge retorted, “would spill evils into the world.”

    “It would disgorge the true liberty that is our human birthright and which a delusion of statehood, rooted on power lust, has usurped from us.” The youth smiled. “But my absolute autonomy can’t actually be taken away, so I’ve reclaimed it as mine.”

    “You haven’t answered my questions yet.” The prosecuting attorney interjected quickly: he realized that the judge’s debating with the witness wasn’t helping his case and it might even be construed as prejudicing the jury. “Why here? You’ve placed yourself in a life or death situation because capital crimes like sedition, are still punishable here, by death.”

    “That’s another opinion which I see as utterly false. Death isn’t a penalty: death is a soul’s reward for successfully completing its life. Spending my lifetime incarcerated in a penal institute would be a torment. I’d rather put myself to a mortal hazard. I’ll be found not-guilty and walk free, or be found guilty and die.”

    “If this jury sets you free,” the judge angrily ejaculated, “they would be guilty of the sedition that you are charged with. The justice department needs authority to keep citizens safe. Crimes aren’t simply notions: they are real. Crimes are nasty things, really happening, to actually existing people and criminals cause true-to-life harms.”

    “No sir, they are not!” The man in the witness box stated emphatically. “The harms done to people are certainly real but according to the authority and to the law court, that’s not the crime. The wrong was committed by harming the state’s rule, not by the real act that evoked it. If I have a bottle of water and then drink it, how many bottles do I have left?”

    “Obviously none,” the judge’s voice was scoffing, “just as you have no case either.”

    “I have one. I drank the liquid contents and I still have the bottle, albeit empty. But your precious state doesn’t care about the human life housed within the law shell: its only concern is for the law bottle. In a case of murder, the court deals exclusively with theoretical damage the bottle sustained when the life within was spilled out.”

    “That’s the way law works!” The judge snapped.

    “That’s the way untruth works and how a non-existent state tries to make itself seem to be real. And it’s why I suggested earlier that a court of lies is not able to withstand any truth, much less the whole truth.” The young man turned to meet the eyes of the jury members. “Blind slavery to the rule-of-law isn’t the only way to address the very real issues of rapes, robberies and killings. In fact it’s absolutely the worst imaginable way because linking crimes with the government, through the process of law, has a reciprocal effect of giving a person with a grudge against the state, a way of expressing his political anger, by committing a crime that coincidentally hurts an innocent person.”

    “How could law possibly do that?” The magistrate floundered out his words. He was at a loss for how to clip off this attack on his precious law—and his livelihood.

    “A person angered by the government, the bureaucracy, the police, the lawyers or anything else about the state’s hateful authority, can aim his rage at the bottle, and forget that the water inside is a life. He circumvents his conscience by internally viewing of his wrongful act as targeted only at the water bottle. A rapist for example, can physically express an anti-establishment statement with a rape committed against a state’s law—and get some taboo sex on the side. Would he have actually done the rape, and would innocent victim have suffered that sexual abuse, if the rule-of-law’s convoluted falsehoods hadn’t mystically transformed a real harm committed against an actual person, into a theoretical crime happening to a non-existent government’s hypothetical property? Putting it in a more succinctly, would the act have occurred if society’s warped order-keeping system hadn’t actively encouraged it? Since law holds itself immune to prosecution for the crimes it commits, I’ve intentionally come to court charged with sedition for inciting people to rebel against an authority that is grossly unfit for rule and guilty of heinous crimes against humanity.”

    “Crimes against humanity!” In his anger, the judge sputtered the words and some spittle drooled down his chin. Then his mouth continued to work without sound as his brain sought for an elusive rebuttal.

    “Objection.” The prosecutor interjected. “This trial is specific to a sedition charge.”

    “Sustained!” The beleaguered judge grasped for the offered escape rope. “The jury will disregard the last remarks.”

    “Then ask a pertinent question?” The young defendant smugly challenged: he knew this opponent wouldn’t find one to ask.

    “I’m finished with this witness.” The state’s prosecuting lawyer said in a defeated voice. ‘He’s squashed my whole case’. The prosecutor didn’t have another person to take the stand, at least not one able to bear-up well under cross-examining. ‘He might even verbally incite a police office to draw a weapon and shoot him in court.’

    “You can step down.” The judge said.

    “What, if any, of my testimony is the jury instructed to recall?” The excused witness asked with an air of faked innocence: now both the state’s lawyer and their judge were in an equal state of off-balance.

    “We’ll adjourn for lunch!” The judge growled. Even his reading the transcript in a break was unlikely to produce a good answer to that cutting remark. But he needed some time to compose himself and seemingly, the prosecution did too.