[Today, Mandy was sentenced to 16 months in prison. During the sentencing hearing, she made this statement to the court, which was interrupted 8 times, by both the judge and the prosecutor. In the end, they spoke more during the time alloted to Mandy than Mandy spoke…
Click-through for the whole piece. It’s fantastic. I love how she takes every opportunity to remind the justice officials that she doesn’t respect their authority.
Some of my friends from Waterloo, who are friends with Mandy, were quick to point out this this MLK quote addressed the rebuttals of the Judge concerning Martin Luther King’s tactics:
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed by the white moderate,” he wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,’ who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
So there you go.
This reminds me of the time a friend was on trial for allegedly assisiting an Iranian woman set to be deported (back to Iran, where she had “illegally” left her husband and faced severe repression upon her return. Nice one Canada) escape from custody at the airport. Really, other people played more important roles in the whole thing, but he was present and he was the only one they managed to identify so he became the symbol of the whole thing… bla bla bla. Anyways, what I can’t get over to this day is the way his prosecutor, in her closing statement, called up Hobbes. She wanted to address the ethical dimension of his alleged actions, and argue that people should always be bound by the rule of law, even when the legal system is doing it wrong and a higher ethical principle is served through illegal actions. So she quotes Hobbes, that famous, terrible bit about the war of man against man and how that is what our society would have in store if we didn’t punish people like him for following through to the end a higher ethical principle.
Anyways, the original post (click through for her whole statement, it’s great) and this story of mine really highlight just how often court proceedings, as least those that involve activists or anarchists and direct action kinds of activities, always end up being about asserting the validity of the legal system and the rule of law itself, and how they are always pulling out (and, arguably, misreading) famous historical examples (like the case at hand, and the judge’s poor comparison of these G20 activists and the KKK!?) or the 17th century philosophy that underpins the system itself. Fascinating stuff. Oh I would not mind doing ethnographic research on this….
- January 15 2012 | 55 Notes - Read More →
