By Brandon Cole

Bronton

“Yes, Your Honor, I admit I was in that bodega and I shot the clerk four times in the chest when he wouldn’t hand over the money, wasn’t much money either so why he wouldn’t do what I said don’t make sense, but I shot him in self-defense. I thought he might have a weapon, a knife or something, or would come at me from behind the counter the way he was resisting me, jump at me with some karate move him being Asian and probably take my gun, so I defended myself the only way I knew how and killed him. I’m lucky to be alive. But I had no intention to kill anybody, I was just there to rob the place and I had to defend myself from this clerk who looked like he was about to kill me.”

Wesley

“That’s not exactly what happened, Your Honor, the way the prosecutor laid out here to you and the jury, and my side’s a bit different. So before you pass sentence, I am gonna say now what this fight really was about. Yes I was hitting that guy in the face because he’d mouth-offed at me, and I hit him a good few times but he wouldn’t fall down, he kept telling me, ‘Punk, that all you got?’ I was afraid for my life, someone like that able to take the beating I was giving him, and I thought he had some kind of weapon, maybe a gun in his shoe, so I shot him to protect myself, I was really afraid he was gonna hurt me because he was bleeding so bad and cursing me. And then maybe he has friends, you know, and family and they’d come after me so I killed him just to save myself. But I got caught running away to turn myself in to the police and that’s pretty much what happened, it was self-defense and why my lawyer wouldn’t let me plead self-defense and take the stand is something I still haven’t figured out. ”

Jeremy

“Yes, Your Honor, I do understand that many people think a public defender’s office is a relatively safe place but they haven’t been in my shoes facing the deceased across a desk with a letter opener and two staplers: that’s what I was thinking about, ‘Why two staplers?’  Maybe one to throw at my head and kill me, and the way he was acting, strange you know, superior, like he didn’t care about me or any other human being, just himself, and like he knew, him being a lawyer, that there wasn’t any crime he couldn’t commit and not get away with it, or with just a slap on the wrist as some say, even killing me with a stapler or maybe with one of those heavy books on the shelf behind him. So even though he was semi-paralyzed with that crippling disease he had, I shot him to save myself and I kept thinking as he slumped over bleeding and I pumped a few more slugs in him, I kept thinking, ‘You still feeling superior? You still want to throw that stapler at my head and kill me, sucker? Well how you gonna do that now, now you’re dead?’ ‘Course I ran out and would have gone straight to the cops if them other lawyers hadn’t grabbed me first, ‘fraid as I still was for my life, because then I thought, ‘Maybe he wasn’t dead, maybe he’s got some kind of immune system or whatnot from that disease that five bullets couldn’t penetrate enough, maybe something like that.’ Crazy sounding, right? But that’s what went through my mind and that’s why I ran too. Afraid for my life, Your Honor, it was pure self-defense in the few seconds I had to react to the threat of that stapler. I wouldn’t have shot him if there was some other way, I swear, but there was no other way then, it was him and that stapler or me and that’s why I defended myself so convincingly.”

Werner

“Yes, Your Honor, I do understand that someone like this sixty-year-old lady I stabbed, a nurse as she was for forty years and on the thin side, she could appear to be some innocent victim and not capable of much trouble, but that’s not who I was facing. That’s who she was only on the outside. What she only appeared to be is maybe the right phrase. I’ve had a lot of hospital experience at the VA and I know what kind of drugs nurses have access to, especially the registered nurses who are almost like doctors with their narcotics’ privileges, and all I could think about as she came over to ask me if I was in terrible pain, I’m saying to myself, ‘Sure, like I haven’t read about those nurses killing patients in their beds with some kind or other drug.’ They call them mercy killings sometimes, Your Honor, and you know I’m pretty sick, some folks think I’m a goner or close to it. So I’m watching her hands, and I’m looking at her clothes how loose they are, and there’s something shiny in those pockets, so as soon as she reached inside one I stabbed her quick before she could get that syringe in me, jabbing me with that syringe that was not going to happen, not to this man, I’ve been through war zones and I know danger when I see it. I don’t look for trouble never have but when trouble comes at me with a syringe, or even just maybe with a syringe, being a killer nurse or some drug addict, I’m gonna defend myself, I’m not just gonna let this anyone maniac kill me without reacting first, whether it’s a mercy killing or a bar fight.”

Linton

“I ask you, Your Honor, you being African-American like so many others of us, if a policeman is chasing you and shouting at you to stop, you gonna stop? ‘Course you’re not because what chance would you have then, stopping? You think raising your hands’s gonna help? That’s not likely for a black man, not late at night like it was on that empty street, with no street lights, ok? No street lights, that’s one very important point to consider when it’s self-defense we’re talking. You know this cop’s gonna shoot you or kill you in some way, why else would he be chasing you with his gun out and screaming like he was crazy mad when you ain’t done nothin’ wrong that he could know about? And what’s with the district attorney saying that’s ‘standard police procedure’? Not in my neighborhood it’s not, it’s not standard anything. A cop chasing you in my neighborhood is life-threatening is what it is and a man, even if he’s black like me or you, has a right to defend himself if he’s being chased as I was and coming within two inches of being killed so I shot him because he was gonna shoot me, it was self-defense pure and simple. And he didn’t go down easy even with that heavy bullet-proof vest, and he was calling me all kinds of things and telling me to back off, yeah right back off so you can shoot me the same way one of your buddies shot my big cousin Jarlin two years ago when he hadn’t been out of jail for not even two months? No Sir! Not this time! So I shot him till he got quiet and then I felt I was safe because I’d defended myself from his attack, but it was a close call and I know I’m lucky to be alive to explain what actually happened. I just wish someone had a video.”

Sherry

“Yes, Your Honor, thank you, I would like to say a few words before you pass sentence because I don’t think my story has been told, not completely, not with the understanding necessary being a single mother in her car with her two small children strapped in the back seat because that’s the law, and I have followed the law all my life as best I could. Some may think it odd I carry a handgun but that’s how I was raised, I was raised with guns and I’ve seen them being helpful especially if you’re a single mother and about to be raped like I was. Because why else was this man coming up knocking at my window and asking if I had a cell phone? Because his car was broken down like he said? Oh really? Your car just happens to be broken down on a rainy night and here you are choosing me to call triple A? Is that a story or is that a threat? Well, with my two young daughters strapped safe in the rear seat and crying at me, ‘What’s wrong, Mommy? and ‘What does this big man want, Mommy?’ I’m not sitting there thinking too long about my family coming out of this alive so I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him through the window and when he backed away and said, ‘Whoa Lady! Hold on with that!’ I knew where this was heading and feared for my life and the lives of my two young daughters and before he could pull out a weapon I shot at his heart watching him fall and waited for him to move and when he didn’t, I got out of the car and shot him again, this time in his head just to be real certain this potential rapist was dead.  Then I told my daughters right there, ‘You’re all right now, girls, that bad man’s not gonna hurt us, not anymore. Your mamma’s saved you.’ It was our lives or his and that’s just the simple truth. I defended myself and I defended my family same as anyone would who has the courage God gave us.”

Billy

“Yes, thank you, Your Honor, for giving me this last chance to explain myself because as you say this court has found me guilty of murder and that is a serious, a very serious crime especially for someone with an arrest record like mine, but let my facts be told now. I steal packages off porches, that’s how I make my living, what with Amazon and Wal-Mart and UPS trucks all over the streets casually dropping them off there’s been good pickings out there some years now as many people know, especially law enforcement. I’m a package thief, that I don’t deny, and people who know me they know what I do, they call me ‘Pack-Man’ or ‘Easy Billy’, and they’re happy to pay what I can turn up with at a reduced price, a very reduced price to say it. But a package thief is not a murderer, no Sir, that is not what a package thief is, especially a package thief who’s good at it like I am, that kind of package thief is not a murderer never has been and never will be. And why? Because it’s a victimless crime, that’s what it is, victimless, which is why I do it. The folks I steal packages from what they do is they claim a missed delivery and Amazon, or EBay, or whoever, will resend the item always, or almost always, or least very frequently, and free of charge. Or folks get a full refund. And that’s just straight out truth that anyone can check for themselves. But this one bad-luck Sunday in this good neighborhood I frequent out on the Island there’s this flat screen TV – fifty-inch it was so not even that big – I’m picking it up off this empty porch and suddenly this heavy guy flings open the front door and points a shot gun at me to say, ‘Where you goin’ with that, man?’ and before I can answer with some kind of pleasing stupidness like, ‘Oh, my mistake, Sir, this is my first day on the job and I just don’t have these addresses right,’ he tells me, waving those long barrels right in my face, ‘Down on your knees, you prick, and keep your mouth shut,’ and I do get down on my knees, I do right away, and I’m thinking this guy in his dirty t-shirt, unshaved and with a belly like that on him, this guy is gonna blow my guts open, so soon’s he turns his head to say, ‘Honey, call the cops! I finally caught this thievin’ motherfucker!’ and those are his exact words, I reach behind me for my safety pistol and I shoot him twice in his big belly before he had time to shoot me which I was certain he had every intention of doing, angry and threatening and hung-over looking as he was. Shoot me dead and for what, Sir? A flat screen TV that’s not even that big or costly? That’s what I was thinking if I was thinking anything as I reached for my safety pistol, my mind racing as it was and terrified, ‘Billy, this guy’s gonna kill you right here and now over a two-hundred-dollar television if you don’t defend yourself like a man.’ And that’s what I did, Sir, and that’s all that I did, I defended myself from an angry guy who looked drunk and was pointing a shotgun at me and was hell bent on spreading my guts all over his lawn.”

Angela

“Yes, Your Honor, thank you, I do want to say first that I regret, I sincerely regret taking up your time and the time of the good people on the jury with a matter that should never have been brought to your attention, in my opinion, and to the attentions of these twelve good people. That these good people have just made the sinful mistake of convicting me of murder in the second degree is not a blame I place on them, not a single one, bless them all, but on the district attorney sitting right there who has mislead them so terribly. She’s the only guilty one in this courtroom and she will have to live with that punishing guilt of sending me to prison every day and every night until she faces Our Lord, which I hope is soon. It’s sinful I know for me to say I wish her dead but I do hope and pray her death may come soon so she can feel His justice as I am feeling hers. May it please Our Lord to forgive her as He can in all his mercy that day of her judgment, but I’m just a simple God-fearing woman and I cannot forgive, I’m trying to forgive her as Minister teaches but I cannot forgive because of all the lies she told about me. For a beginning, do I look like a woman who would stand outside an abortion clinic, which is another word for a death chamber, and wait in ambush to kill the first person I believe had just committed the sin-filled crime of infanticide, like she says I was? Or would I be waiting to ambush any doctor or nurse or nurse’s aide who had assisted in the terrible deed of killing an innocent child like she said? Or was I waiting to kill anyone who was there to kill more children should some poor lost women come their way seeking their guidance? Was I waiting to kill any of these abortion workers, sinners as they are and deserving of the most painful punishments of hell? No, Your Honor, all those abortionists are murderers of innocent babies and will pay for their killings come judgment in a place outside this courtroom, but looking to kill one of them is not who I am and that was not what I was there doing. Was I carrying a lethal weapon like the district attorney said? Damn right I was and that is just a fact that I admit to as my legal right. That weapon, that AK 47, was for protection, only for protection, to protect myself or to protect any poor young woman who was being dragged into that death chamber against her will by some brute of a husband not man enough to support a child he fathered with his wages, and she being too afraid to scream for help. I was there standing by as was famously said by my President and was ready to stand up too if Our Lord spoke to me or when my duty came bursting out of my heart. Because I know a helpless woman when I see her and I can tell a baby killer from up close and from ten blocks away. And do you think you can stand behind a barricade shaking your fist and screaming at me to get a life and calling me slut face and dog-shit-for-brains and believe I’m not going to protect myself from your threats and your violent and life-threatening behavior? You think so? You think I’m gonna stand by helpless and crying like those poor dying unborn babies inside your death chambers? Well, if you think so, you never grew up in my family is what I will tell you nor in the trailer next door or even two towns away. Because if you had, you’d a known my family’s reputation and you’d a known you can be dying soon by shaking your fist at me and screaming at me or talking trash to any of my kin. Do any of that behavior around me or my family you’d just be asking to be killed, actually you’d be begging for it. We’re God-fearing people in these parts with too much self-respect to let any loud-mouth screaming-crazy baby-killers threaten and abuse us or trespass near our trailer park. And thanks to God we still live in a country where if you scream at me like that crazy woman did and threaten me, I have the right of self-defense and I can blow your baby-killer’s head off which is what I did. And I would regret the loss of that baby-killer’s life, I would, but not when she’d tried to kill me with hate in her eyes like she had. In a case like that I’m gonna defend myself every time and whoever you are you’re gonna die unless you’re a quicker shot, which is all that happened, Your Honor. I shot her before she had the chance to find somebody to give her a gun and shoot me.”

Clifton

“Well, Your Honor, I stand before you not as the crazed vigilante the prosecutor says I am but as a rancher from five generations of ranchers and as a legal American citizen from many many generations of legal American citizens concerned only about two things: my cattle and the future of this country.  I’ve been found guilty of five homicides and I’m going to be doing some hard time, that’s no mistake, so that’s my burden, but I’m not standing before you to whine and cry for mercy about the hardship my prison time will cause my family. What’s done is done. I see what happened one way and the prosecutor sees it another, there it is. He won and I lost, simple. I do want to say though that if you live on the range as I have all my life, the world has a different feeling from a law office and a court room. I call it a loneliness some days, a burning loneliness that can make a man embrace a hardness, at least a man like me who lost his two sons in Iraq and a daughter in Afghanistan, such a hardness that says clearly to everyone around, ‘Just do what’s right and you know what that is, behave cordial, watch what you say to me and how you say it, and there’ll never be a problem with me, never ever.’ But what happens when I’m losing cattle? Not a lot of ‘em, first one then a few in my northern herd and then a few more near the border and no one’s investigating, I mean Sheriff he’s investigating best he can, but here close on the border there’s not much cattle investigating goin’ on these nights. Can’t be. Every man-jack in law enforcement’s on border patrol or dealing with them swarms of illegals or migrant violence or nasty bar fights or highway drunk fatalities. A few cattle more or less, that’s what just’s been come to be called around here ‘the way things are now’. So I guess the problem was I’m a slow learner because I don’t believe stealing a man’s cattle is ‘the way things are’ now or ever. I see stealing cattle as stealing pure and simple and if you’re stealing my property on my land then I’m gonna shoot you whether you’re just drunk and stupid and claim to be lost or you’re carrying a weapon or not. The prosecutor claimed and the jury agreed that the family I came across were just illegals from Guatemala or Nicaragua, I’m still not sure which nor why it matters, and there was no cause for me to shoot them, especially the children, that’s the record as it was presented to this court and I’m clear on that as far as it goes. And my claim of self-defense was torn to shreds because no weapons were ever found to justify my killing these folks sitting around a fire cooking what looked to be my beef. But I would say to you, Your Honor, before you pass sentence, that on a moonless night out on the range a man’s not going to be seeing too well, not even with my military infrareds, so who’s got a weapon and who’s twelve years old or who’s an unarmed girl barely older than a baby is some tough questions, and being there as I was, alone, I feared for my life so when they all stood up and looked like they were reaching for their weapons and about to come at me I shot ‘em all to defend myself.  I didn’t shoot all them illegals to leave no witnesses as the prosecutor claimed but to defend myself is the truth. If it was a mistake to shoot all of them and I’m still not sure it was but if it was a mistake it was an honest one because I believed and I still believe I had to kill these folks cooking on that corner of my property with no right to be there before they killed me. I don’t know what you call what happened that night if you don’t call it self-defense. The prosecutor calling it felony murder, that to me is just some big-city-damn horseshit. And I do expect our governor or the next one to pardon me, yes Sir, I do because it’ll be clear to most folks once all this noise dies off that what I did I had the right to do. And what’s more there are still rich and powerful people in this state who are my friends and they know how to exert the right pressures when they need to, that’s a simple truth and folks can like it or not. That day when I walk out of prison fully pardoned and a free man again, the district attorney and his ilk will have to swallow hard and accept that justice has finally been served. Thank you, Your Honor, and God bless.”

Rose

Yes, Your Honor, thank you, I would like to say a few words on my behalf though my attorney has advised against it because as a police officer she believes I have a very good chance of having my murder conviction overturned on appeal. Be that as it may, after twelve years on the force and with a fairly clean record and if you’ll bear with my saying so, I have seen justice miscarried and innocent people imprisoned often enough – though never on my testimony as the district attorney said and testified to by his unreliable witnesses. But having experienced firsthand plenty of flawed trials and skewed jury verdicts, and I beg your forbearance here, Your Honor, I believe I must take advantage of these last moments of freedom I have in your courtroom to put my story on the record in my own words because something went very wrong at this trial. Is there shoddy police work sometimes? Of course there is. Being a policewoman is a job after all like other jobs and shoddy work happens everywhere unfortunately, even at companies like Boeing and well-respected federal institutions like the FBI. Are there examples of police officers lying under oath or falsifying evidence or shaking down drug dealers or facilitating prostitution or stopping pedestrians or pulling over vehicles without probable cause? I say again yes. Have I personally witnessed any of these serious misconducts or do I know any officers who have? Unfortunately again I must say yes. Have people of color historically been singled out by the police across this country, very often unfairly, very often illegally, especially when it comes to drugs, and prosecuted and sentenced with unjustifiable harshness – the list could go on. But our system of policing as it exists today, flawed as it often is, was not on trial here, I was, and I mention these issues to show that policemen and policewomen are human beings with human failings, often very serious human failings unfortunately. Did I fail as a human being and as a policewoman when I shot my husband to death? Perhaps. But is such a human and official failure worthy to be called a crime such as the crime I have just been convicted of, that of voluntary manslaughter? Here, I need to disagree vehemently with the prosecutor’s case and the findings of the jury as to the facts. For the facts as the prosecutor laid them out are, in brief, that living for over ten years with my husband in the house which we own, there’s no way I could mistake his coming into our bedroom for an intruder so shooting him was pure and simple murder. That I had just learned earlier that evening my husband was having an affair with one of my fellow officers and it was likely he was coming home at three am because he had just been with her, that I will say forever is pure conjecture. Yes, I had just learned that evening he’d destroyed our marriage, that is true, but whether he’d just been with his lover or out getting drunk with his worthless buddies, I wouldn’t have been able to say that night or at the time of my arrest and I can’t say so now. I can’t say where he was. What I can say is that unable to sleep and contemplating a nasty divorce as I was that night, I heard a side table turn over and some breaking glass and some heavy breathing and that’s when I reached for my service firearm in the dark and pointed it at the door. Was I afraid? Yes, Your Honor, I was. Did I hear someone curse, ‘Fuckin’ god damnit where’s that light switch gone to?’ as the record states, yes I did hear those words, but I did not recognize that deranged voice as the voice of my husband.  It sounded to me like the voice of a man intent on deadly violence. And when our bedroom door slammed open I shot at what I honestly believed was an intruder coming in to rape me. In two words, yes I feared for my life, and I defended myself against someone who, I believed then and I believe now, was there to do me life-threatening injury. As a police officer I know what self-defense is when I see it and that is what I was doing that night when I mistakenly took my husband for a rapist and killed him: I was defending myself.”

Preese

“Yes, thank you, Your Honor, for allowing me this time to make a final statement, a statement I believe will help you see that this trial has been a farce, and that the government’s case was never proved, and that the district attorney has played you for a fool. I know I’m talking strong, Sir, but it’s what I feel and I ask you please hear me out. I’m not saying you’re a fool, Sir, no Sir, I’m just saying you been played like I’ve been by the government. I stand convicted of seven counts of vehicular homicide committed when I was drunk, or to talk in the language of the district attorney, when I was driving my pickup that afternoon with a blood alcohol level of point-two-zero, which, as the district attorney correctly pointed out, is well above the level where blackouts occur, though I do add usually to that, Your Honor – because for people who have a high tolerance for alcohol as I do these established levels are rough guidelines at best. But I did not at trial and am not now contesting the blood alcohol finding nor do I contest the national standard that a level of point zero eight is considered too drunk to drive, and I do freely admit I was more than two times over that limit. All these findings are on the record and I accept them all again here today as I did at trial, every single one. Yes, Sir, I’d had a few drinks, you might say I’d been drinking, and you might even say I’d been drinking heavy all that afternoon and getting angrier and angrier. I wouldn’t disagree. But why was I drinking like I was? That to me is the important question that was never adequately addressed during these proceedings. And why was I getting angrier and angrier and more drunk, legally speaking? That is the second important question and I will answer both of them again now more fully than I did at trial in the hope you will take my thoughtful answers into consideration before sentencing. My first answer is that I was drinking hard that afternoon because The United States has been going to hell for a long time, that’s been clear to a lot of us country folks, especially to those of us who consider ourselves God-loving Americans and freedom-loving patriots. Have we been able to live with this deterioration of the country we love? I say, Sir, yes we have, for the most part, we have been able to get by with living our lives, not easily some days but we’ve done it generally well enough. In other words, more or less peacefully. None of us has liked standing on the sidelines weeks at a time helpless and fuming but we’ve been nursing our frustrations with the hope and prayer we could stop our country’s deterioration sooner rather than later. And we have made progress, we have, especially recently by electing some politicians especially from the predominantly white rural South who are as concerned as we are about the destructive path our country’s taken and who talk the way we do, and I mean these representatives talk the language of outrage and violent solutions and of punishing those against us with baseball bats, I do say so, or with stronger means if it comes to that. To be clear, I’m talking high-powered serious weaponry if a problem comes to that as is our second-amendment right. But then my government, just when this progress is going on and it’s looking like violent insurrection can be avoided, the government that is supposed to represent me and protect my freedom-loving way of life and on top of all the terrible and destructive things it’s been doing for years, it’s gonna tell me now I got to get vaccinated? You do what? By what authority? And if I don’t I can’t go to the movies? Or kiss my girl at the mall? Or maybe I lose my job? That vax mandate was another stone thrown at the faces of us freedom fighters and a stone many of us have not been able to duck. And I for one have been hurtin’ pretty bad over it. So yes I was drinking hard that afternoon, who wouldn’t be? But I was drinking to calm myself is what I was doing, and I had, I really had become calm. So by the time I walked out to my pickup I’d thought my way through many of these important problems and even this vaccine abuse and violation of my basic American rights and was quiet enough inside to just want to drive myself home, grab a few more beers, turn the TV on to a sit-com for a few laughs, and that’s all I had in my mind to do. I’m well aware the district attorney has painted a much different picture of my state of mind after I came out the bar but he can’t see inside my head as I can and his version is just plain wrong today as it was all trial and especially during his closing arguments which I believe influenced the jury so unduly. But here’s where the story can get tricky, and if you’ll bear with my saying so, Your Honor, I think this is where it became tricky for the jury, because I was on my way home and peaceable, least that’s what I believed, but I must have got disoriented somehow and turned off highway onto a street that didn’t look familiar and then suddenly I’m pulling into a parking lot packed with vehicles and long lines of folks, must have been five long lines I can’t remember, but there was a lot, all lined up outside these huge white tents like for that Antiques Road Show. So I begin driving slow down an open lane looking for an exit when this tall black guy at the end of this one line, he says to me as I drive up to him, ‘Hey, where you goin’? Wait your turn!’ And, Sir, this man’s voice it had a meanness to it, that’s all I can say it had, just pure meanness and arrogance, so I stop my pickup and say to him, ‘Wait my turn for what, asshole?’ And he wasn’t put off by my answering him like that not one bit big as I am, so I’m starting to figure something could be brewing between us that will need settling and I’m getting myself ready and checking to see my baseball bat’s handy when he says, ‘For the vaccine, asshole, what the hell you think we’re here for?’ So then I go all kind of stupid, I mean playing stupid, and I say sweetly as I can, ‘Oh really, a vaccine? And what vaccine would that be, asshole? Cow pox maybe?’ So he turns a little more towards me, looking at me, more like studying me and says, ‘Why don’t you stop causing trouble and get on out of here now, go on, get on your way,’ and so I say to myself, ‘Oh yeah? Get on my way should I, asshole?’ and I nudge the accelerator just a bit kind of coming up real close to him and maybe I grazed him a little with my bumper, maybe, but couldn’t have been much, but he jumps away like I’d set him on fire and shouts to the people up ahead of him, ‘Watch out for this fucking lunatic! He’s gonna kill somebody with his truck! He’s crazy drunk!’ and about twenty of them in line turn in my direction and here’s where I may have made a little mistake, maybe, because I leaned far out the window and shouted at the closest ones, ‘Crazy drunk, huh? I’ll show you crazy drunk, assholes! I’m gonna drive right through your dumb vaccinated asses and you’re gonna need some damn cow pox vaccines then! A whole shitload of ‘em!’ That’s what I said but I hadn’t meant it, it was like when Trump talks not caring about half what comes out, and I was set to back up and be on my way when a few guys got around my pickup and one leaned in the passenger side and said tough-like, ‘What’s eating you, man? Why don’t you just park your truck now and walk around a bit, drink some water and sober up before you hurt somebody,’ and then I was afraid, yes, Sir, I was afraid this angry mob was going to drag me out my pickup and beat me to death so I gunned the engine in reverse which knocked some of them away and then I gunned it in first gear at high revs and plowed through that mob as the only way I saw to save myself. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody too bad but to scare them off and certainly didn’t mean to kill, but this mob was surrounding me and I had to defend myself. The district attorney led the jury to think my judgment was impaired because of my drinking but I’ve been driving drunker than that my whole life and had a serious problem only one time at a gas station, but certainly not a problem like this one. So my drinking can’t have been an issue is what I’m saying. I was being attacked by an angry mob and I feared for my life and I defended myself the only way I could so those vaccine fanatics wouldn’t beat me to death.”

Robert

“Thank you, Your Honor, for giving me this time to make a statement before you consider sentencing. I’ve prepared some notes which I hope the court will not object to, but I can put them aside. I know what I want to say. Well then, I stand convicted of the attempted murder of a former president of The United States. As my lawyer explained to me pre-trial, the attempted murder of a sitting president can carry a life-sentence, but the law is vague about the attempted murder of a former president; in other words, the maximum penalty could be less. Frankly, I don’t care, Sir, what the penalty is. From the record you know I’m a man who takes education seriously, so not the sort of criminal you’re used to seeing in your courtroom, I think you’d agree. But, Your Honor, I’m pleased to stand before you convicted of this attempted murder, and I will take these next few moments to explain why. Some assassinations have always bothered me, especially the assassinations of the two Kennedys, of Malcolm X, and of Martin Luther King. Why kill these remarkable people is the question I have asked myself for many years. Weren’t these two Kennedys and Malcolm and Martin Luther trying to improve our society? I think it fair to say they were. Could some people seriously believe they were trying to destroy it? Apparently they could. Can we call such people dangerous? Yes we can. And do such people still exist in our society today? Clearly they do. Is the former president one of those people? There is no question in my mind, Your Honor: yes he is. But who is doing anything about the threat he poses? Nobody. Yes, there’s cases in the courts about financial misdoings. I for one believe they will never lead anywhere. And if a court hands down a serious penalty, and I mean long jail time and confiscation of assets, there’ll be appeals that will circumvent that decision is my best guess. But all these legal skirmishes whatever their outcome mean nothing to me. What concerned me to the point where I bought a high-powered rifle and two semi-automatic pistols, which is legal and easy to do in the state of Georgia, is that the former president has given standing to the uneducated and the racist in our society, and he has encouraged the American people to be proud of their ignorance. Proud of your ignorance? In the America I was raised in it was a person’s obligation to get themselves educated, to learn and to keep learning, to learn something, to learn anything so as to able to converse as an equal with anyone. And here this man is saying, ‘Be ignorant! I love ignorant people! Don’t read! You know all you need to know! There’s nothing you need to learn, nothing! Just shout patriotism and freedom, thump the Bible and follow me!’ Is this not shameful behavior? Is it not reprehensible? Is it not scandalous and dangerous? Is it not an abomination, an encouragement to personal slovenliness, and a repudiation of the great traditions that founded our country and have been promoted as progress for generations to the benefit of so many? Why is there not more outrage directed against him? This man is not only a disgrace to America, he is a disgrace to the world and he is a disgrace to humanity. He has the morals and the look of a rabid dog, and to shoot a rabid dog is considered a service to the community. But here’s where I faced a difficulty, Your Honor, because shooting a rabid dog, that’s one thing, the poor beast is clearly a deadly menace to humans and must be put down, but shooting a human being, even a contemptible and a dangerous one, well, that’s not something I could see myself doing even though I believed this human being, I mean this wretched excuse for a human being, deserved to be dragged off the face of this earth twenty years ago. So I went back to thinking about those folks who killed the Kennedy boys, and Malcolm and Martin Luther, and I’m thinking what did those killers have, what did they know to do those killings, and unjustified killings to boot, that I was missing. And the solution I came up with and why I’m at peace with myself is that those assassins believed they were being attacked by the Kennedy boys or Malcolm and what they were doing was defending themselves. And once I figured that out, once I figured out that this ex-president was not only attacking the values that were precious to me he was attacking me, and he would rejoice to see me dead, and he was encouraging others to kill me had they the chance. Once I took his threatening words seriously, I knew I needed to defend myself from his violence, and I was on my way to kill that semi-human garbage dump in good spirits and with a clean conscience. And I believe I would have killed him if the Secret Service hadn’t surprised me at that check point and found my weapons. So that is that, Sir, as to how I arrived at your sentencing and why: it was self-defense. There’s just two last points I’d like to make, Your Honor. One is that this man has created a following of thugs and dumbbells who think they have the right to pick up high-powered weapons and to strut around public spaces and to act tough and to scare people into submission. I want them to know there’s a whole lot more of us in this country who don’t scare, and especially don’t scare in the face of ignorance and swagger, confederate flags, and loud mouths carrying big guns anyone can buy. In other words, if there’s ignorant thugs out there looking for a fight and who foolishly believe they’re following this ex-president’s destructive lead toward freedom and better times, there’s decent educated Americans who are prepared to meet them and make them understand they made a bad choice. And the outcome of such a meet-up is not in doubt. People who live in ignorance and glorify their ignorance by calling it freedom are going to end up being just dead ignorant people and have gotten what they deserved is what I know. That lesson is being taught in this latest pandemic and was fully taught in the Civil War that left six hundred thousand dead in a population of thirty-one million. But folks who don’t trust science and who don’t know their history and don’t want to learn anything from books will have to learn that bad choices can kill them the very hard way. One of the best teachers I believe for someone stubbornly determined to stay ignorant, aggressive, and self-righteous is to see the person next to them and the one in front of them fall to the ground and to watch them bleed to death. That’s one point. My last point, Your Honor, is that you should sentence me to life imprisonment because if you let me out I’m going after this guy again and this next time I’ll be more careful. Yes, Sir, I will go after him again. He’s got a target on him now and the way he looks with all that ugly weight he carries that’s a target hard to miss. He should be worried is what he should be because I’m not the only one talking like this. There’s serious folks in this country who’ve finally come round to accepting this guy needs to be stopped for good. Wrong set of circumstances it wouldn’t be harder shooting him than shooting a pig sleeping in the mud. So next time he’s in front of one of the ignorant adoring crowds of screaming and misguided imbeciles he so enjoys talking his trash to he ought to keep a sharp lookout, a very sharp lookout, somebody may be gunning for him and probably is. You see, Your Honor, if someone can take a photo of him fatting around on a golf cart with a super-telephoto lens, then someone can reach him with a bullet with a high-powered rifle and a long-range scope one unsuspecting afternoon when his mouth is stuffed with a third hot dog. So this lout of an ex-president might want to stop talking racist-tough and reconsider what he’s doing or he might want to have someone remind him who shot Huey Long. Might be a good idea for him to watch his friends too on the chance one of them has turned against him. Caesar believed he was among friends is something to remember. Or he might want to start talking tougher and more wild and more foolish to show just how brave he is, not brave enough to do military service but brave enough to dare someone to put a bullet in his over-sized belly when he’s smothered by the Secret Service. He’s got somewhat of a reptilian brain, might just now be the best time to use it, and to start wearing body armor. Thank you, Your Honor, and please stay safe during these difficult times.”

Melissa

“First, I would like to thank you, Your Honor, for the impeccable way you conducted this trial. I believe you are a living testament that an independent and apolitical judiciary is one of the bedrocks of our republic. Though I have just been convicted of seven counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, my lawyer advised me to remain optimistic and combative as these convictions have a chance of being overturned on appeal. Therefore, I do not want to complicate the record by addressing my convictions directly and I ask that my remarks stay off-record because I intend to speak candidly about events preceding this trial. Your Honor, I wish to make three points as my final statement before you pass sentence. The first is that by the newspapers writing so extensively about my black turtlenecks a prejudicial picture was formed of me in the public mind. In brief, my turtlenecks have been called the ‘hip look’ I created as part of my scheme to defraud investors. But I want to say now, Your Honor, that this description of me is totally false and that I believe it affected the jury’s deliberations. For clarification, I wear a black turtleneck like the one I have on today to hide the blood-red heart split in half tattooed on my neck. I got this tattoo the morning after a fellow student raped me in my college dorm. At that time I was a young woman who trusted men. I believed I was with a decent man and did not suspect he would become violently drunk and force me to have sex. The turtlenecks that hide this tattoo are my constant reminders that many if not most men are not to be trusted, that is all this ‘costume’ is, a reminder, and frankly I wish I had these broken hearts all over my body. Because women can never be reminded enough that many if not most men will abuse them. I mention this tattoo now and its history as a first step to explain how my relationship with an abusive male, my ex-husband, twisted my judgment. I want to make it clear that my ex-husband so twisted my judgment that I misrepresented my business’s achievements in order to raise capital from unsuspecting investors. In five words: he made me a liar. This is point number two. Also, I very much want to give voice to the many women who are living lives similar to mine, and I mean by that living in abusive relationships yet unaware how thoroughly they are being abused. My abuse began innocently enough – perhaps – one afternoon when I returned home from my laboratory and my husband asked me how my walk with our dog had gone. We didn’t have a dog, Your Honor, we never had a dog. But this first time he mentioned the dog I just smiled at him thinking it was another one of his jokes that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want him to get angry and call me stupid as he had begun to do so often. A week later, he asked me again about my walk with our dog, this time asking me if there was still blood in her urine. Again I smiled and remained silent, again thinking he was up to one of his odd behaviors that he enjoyed plaguing me with. I called these odd behaviors his ‘private amusements’ and though they wounded me I dismissed them as the passing sillinesses of a man now past his sexual prime. And I had come to hope, Your Honor, I had come to secretly hope that he would mature and his cruel and demeaning treatment of me would soon stop on its own. But after two months of these questions about the non-existent dog, one evening coming home late from another disappointing day at the laboratory and exhausted and worried about my work there, when he asked me about the dog’s pee, I answered cheerfully, “Oh, yes, dear, we had a lovely walk, and we stopped at all the spots she likes to pee.” This answer seemed to please him because he said, ‘That’s so nice to hear, sweetheart, the darling had her pees, very important to know she’s regular. And no blood, hmm, in her urine?’ ‘No, hon, no blood this time thank goodness. I believe the sulfur pills are working.’ ‘Yes, she’s a good vet, that one, knows her job. I mean she knows what medicine to prescribe.’ ‘Well, she came highly recommended and rightly so.’ ‘That’s what always matters,’ he said, ‘solid recommendations from reputable people.’ ‘Always, dear, reliable recommendations, that’s the key.’ I’d caught on, you see, Your Honor, that we had a game now we were playing together, a little bit of make-believe is what I called it, and I saw it as a way for us to become as close as we once had been. And I hoped, Your Honor, yes, I still hoped that this man would be nice to me again and would stop criticizing me so often and so harshly and would come round to see that I too might have something valuable to offer the world even though my laboratory experiments were not going well and any success still seemed far-off. My mistake was I believed this game, if that’s what it was and, foolish women as he often told me I was, I believed that this game of make-believe about the dog and her pees would improve our relationship and that it was harmless. My third and last point has to do with my work and I apologize in advance if the technical details prove onerous.  I have long thought that nuclear fusion is the energy source which will save our planet. I believed and still believe that nuclear fusion is possible and will prove one day a cheap and unlimited source of electricity with zero emissions. Yet, though serious fusion research is still on-going, nuclear fusion has proved to be impossible, especially in the laboratory, and many times given up as a lost cause. Simply put, the heat required for nuclear fusion is just too great. Anyone with a computer can check the correctness of this assertion easily. And yet and yet, yes, Your Honor, nuclear fusion in the laboratory is what my company’s scientists and I were attempting to do for years, and I can say we had promising, not convincing but promising, results in many of our experiments. Ultimately were these experiments failures? Yes all our experiments failed but each failure gave us greater insight into the challenges we faced and, we believed, suggested possible solutions. The problem at this time was that I was running out of money and it looked like I would have to close my laboratory, declare bankruptcy, and stand by helpless as ten years of my life were thrown away as wasted effort. Here is where I turned to my husband as someone I believed was still my friend and still a trusted advisor. It was my husband who convinced me that I could find new financing, perhaps many millions of new dollars, if I simply determined to take my case to the right people, and by the ‘right people’ he meant the wealthy few who had held high positions in government. Such people, if I could convince them, would give my work immense credibility. When I responded that any proposal I could make would be flawed at best, my husband said, “No no no no no! You can never say that! Never! Your work is not flawed, it is strong! Do you understand what I am telling you? Your work deserves important financing from reputable people!” When I cautioned him that I had not achieved positive results and that investors would want to see solid evidence, he said, “You have plenty of results, plenty!” And when I still resisted, he gave me such a furious look that I thought he would break something or storm out, but he said eerily, “What you have to do is nothing more than make them believe that a dog that does not exist is real.” And I began to think about that, Your Honor, how I had been slowly drawn into talking about a non-existent dog and that perhaps, just perhaps, I could convince wealthy and well-respected people to believe in my work even though success was not assured. Here, my husband corrected me again. He stressed that we would be partners going forward and that while he would take care of the financial side I would be the public face of the company and I must never say success was not assured, never. I should say success was assured. Or I should say we are very close to our first successful fusion. Or I should say our first successful fusion is all but assured. And I found to my surprise, Your Honor, that when I made my first presentation to new and significant investors I could find the right words to convince them and I did convince them, many of them. This way of working and raising money went on for some time but eventually questions were directed at me as to the progress of our experiments and soon after more direct questions were sent to me, often from lawyers, asking to see the documents that would reflect this progress. And soon I became concerned that the experiments we were conducting would not prove convincing. Frankly, I knew these experiments were not only unconvincing they were glaring failures. I spoke about these concerns to my husband and he advised me to fend off all these enquiries as touching upon proprietary secrets, he called it ‘referring to the imaginary dog’, and I was able to postpone a reckoning for some time in this way. And perhaps I could have postponed a reckoning indefinitely, Your Honor, I think I still could have, but then in the span of one week I met face to face with my earliest investors, the ones who had had faith in my work and who trusted me completely and who had recommended my work to others, and as I sat in those meetings and looked at their faces, their kind and encouraging and yes hopeful faces, I realized for the first time how terribly I was betraying them and how I had betrayed my calling as a scientist. I was ashamed of myself, Your Honor, utterly ashamed of the woman I had become. But when I went to my husband with my remorse he flew into a terrible rage, screaming at me that I was a weakling and if what I had done was ever exposed I would be charged with fraud. When he quieted, thinking he had convinced me to keep doing what I was doing, I said to him as gently as I could, ‘My fraud? Don’t you mean “our”?’ He nodded as if he agreed and then said deadly serious, ‘You do anything like what you are thinking, you make any sort of confession to anyone, I will make you pay for your stupidity the rest of your life. Do you understand me? You will never be safe from me, never.’ That night I moved out of our house, the next day I filed for divorce, and the day after that, Your Honor, I made an anonymous telephone call to ‘The Wall Street Journal’ that there was a company working on nuclear fusion in San Francisco that was defrauding its investors with false documentation. My husband has made statements in the press that I destroyed our company because I wanted to punish him. He also claims I became increasingly unstable when I could not achieve the laboratory results I wanted. It is clear to me he makes these statements and others like them because he will not admit to himself that for years he was destroying my self-worth and undermining my self-esteem. I did not expose my company’s misdeeds to punish him, Your Honor, I exposed them to defend myself from him the only way I knew how, by destroying the work I cared most about in order to free myself from his tyrannies. This is the defense I would have made, Your Honor, a self-defense, had my attorney permitted it. Thank you, Your Honor, for your patience and for the judicial integrity you showed throughout these proceedings.