Penalty Phase
If it please the court, may I have permission to address the Jury? Thank you your honor.
Ladies and Gentlemen: We have been engaged in a titanic struggle to find the truth in the matter between the accused and my client. And while you have found guilt, as it were, we must ask ourselves if we have, in FACT, found truth. It is my understanding that only in your deep and unflinching wisdom can truth be said to have prevailed.
Dear Jury: my client has not sought punishment nor has he asked for monetary compensation for the stabbing. It is not he who brought the accused before the court. No! My client, Janos Garbo only asked for medical attention to his thigh after the incident … notice the word incident as opposed to ‘attack’ or ‘assault’. Zealotry in the guise of justice (so timed as to possibly influence the re-election of the District Attorney Alhread) is the instrument that motivates these proceedings.
Yes it is a fact, an undisputed fact that on the night of November 28 of last year Professor Langerhans did cause, through loss of muscular control, a wound to the left thigh of the art student Garbo. But subsequent to the injury, the matter would have floated away like a leaf in the breeze of time, unnoticed and inconsequential, had it not been for the kindness and due diligence of the condemned man before you. The very man you have been assigned to sentence.
The good professor did, perhaps in an over agitated state of pathos, make the 911 call that brought attention of not only the paramedics but the honorable District attorney Dorothia Alhread who whereupon seized the opportunity to impugn, degrade, prosecute and convict the kindly Professor whose only impropriety was a weakness for Dry Sherry and the consequence of ‘ unrequited love’.
So, good people, consider the forgoing in submitting your sentence. Paraphrasing the words of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: There was no crime, there is no punishment.
Let me invoke yet another sage another wise and careful moderator of human conduct. William Shakespeare “ the quality of mercy is not strained it dropith like the gentile rain from heaven”
Think probation… think probation… have mercy, think probation. I believe you will be wise… you will bring truth to light the lamp of JUSTICE.
