- Wistful of Dollars
- Aug 25, 2009
-
|
Hey America, thanks for spreading your drat Freeman crap up north.
On the plus side, you've given us some great decisions as a result.
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 01:53
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2024 13:32
|
|
- Wistful of Dollars
- Aug 25, 2009
-
|
Holy crap the way the second one is written is wonderful. Are a lot of Canadian court opinions like this?
I wish; they're usually a lot more dry.
That one is one of the best ones written in years.
I now feel like quoting the opening section, to aid in the amusement of the casual SA browser.
quote:
“You should get out of town”, the man said.
And so began the journey that resulted in my path intersecting with Matthew Duncan’s path. And thence to these reasons, with a slight detour through territory that might have confused Lewis Carroll.
I suppose that I should clarify that there was no menace in the man’s directive to me to get out of town. He was a friend and a colleague in two careers. His suggestion had been that he and I should change positions for a fortnight, giving him exposure to the realities of the northern reaches of Toronto, while I would enjoy a similar change of environment in the more sylvan environs of Niagara Region. I might even see a few plays in the evenings, he pointed out.
And thus I came to meet Mr. Duncan.
At heart, Mr. Duncan’s case was unremarkable. A minor alleged Highway Traffic Act offence led to a police-citizen interaction in the parking lot of Mr. Duncan’s apartment building in the wee hours of the morning. A request that Mr. Duncan produce his licence led to an alleged refusal, which led to an attempt to arrest him, which led to a struggle, which was captured on a very poor quality video taken on a mobile phone, at the end of which Mr. Duncan found himself being placed under arrest for allegedly assaulting a police officer. Nothing unusual in all that. The bread and butter of provincial court.
Of course, I hadn’t counted on the freemen on the land.
Mr. Duncan was self-represented. Other than a mildly annoying disinclination on his part to stand when addressing the court (although he did stand when questioning witnesses), he was a rather pleasant young man. Unfortunately, he was a rather pleasant young man whose mind was filled with what my late father would have called “notions”.
It has been said that, given enough time, ten thousand monkeys with typewriters would probably eventually replicate the collected works of William Shakespeare. Sadly, when human beings are let loose with computers and internet access, their work product does not necessarily compare favourably to the aforementioned monkeys with typewriters.
Thus it was that the trial began with Mr. Duncan objecting to us proceeding on the basis that I had no jurisdiction over him. Mr. Duncan provided me with an “affidavit of truth”, a rather substantial volume that appeared to me to be the result of somebody doing a Google search for terms like “jurisdiction” and the like and then cobbling them together in such a way that it makes James Joyce’s Ulysses look like an easy read. This hodgepodge of irrelevancies relied upon by Mr. Duncan was one of the misbegotten fruits of the internet. Finding it was a waste of Mr. Duncan’s time; printing it was a waste of trees and my reading it was a waste of my time and public money. With that volume as his starting point, Mr. Duncan spent some time explaining to me that I had no jurisdiction to try him, that he was not a citizen of the province or the country, that he was not a person as defined by my definitions, that there was no contract between him and me to give me status to sit in judgment over him and so on. As I have said, Mr. Duncan struck me as a perfectly pleasant young man, but on this issue he seemed a bit obtuse. I suppose that if perfectly pleasant young men weren’t led astray from time to time by drugs, alcohol, broken hearts or rubbish on the internet, then the dockets of provincial court wouldn’t be quite as plump as they usually are. Wistful of Dollars fucked around with this message at 02:19 on May 24, 2014
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 02:13
|
|
- Wistful of Dollars
- Aug 25, 2009
-
|
Ew
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2019 23:52
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 01:53
