As mentioned more or less weekly in recent months, the longest chapter in my upcoming and latest loss-leading book (below) would be Waiting for the Axe to Fall.

But not any more. Below is a draft entry for one of the final chapters, Trying to make sense of it all, that could easily turn this into a tome to equal War and Peace, making it cost-prohibitive. But it needs to be done: as you can see from the feature image, I have declared myself a totally underserved evaluator of judicial findings and come this chapter’s end, I remain confident some of you will agree with the F I’ve given it.

DRAFT CHAPTER #xx TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL!

I’ve always regarded myself as a sticks and stones sort of guy so it’s come as a surprise to me if none of my friends that I’m still very, very, hurt just over a week later by the words the District Court judge last Friday used to describe my arguments at appeal on April 13.

Very, very, hurt indeed – not by the judge’s dismissal of my notice of appeal; that was a given with everything I got to know from my court reporting years about how far-too-many jurists think and act in the Queensland judicial system – but that he called one of my key lines of argument sciocchezze assolute. I categorically deny ever being a sociopathic arsehole! Okay, perhaps I was once but I was successfully treated for that condition a long time ago. Very profession people helped me on that journey. His Latin-learned honour doubled down by declaring my criticisms of the trial magistrate estremamente offensivo; well, they would have been “if made by a legal practitioner against a judicial officer on such a meritless basis”.

I know. I know! You couldn’t make this shit up, right? I’ll work on a better analogy but it must be a bit like this: after hearing a jury’s guilty verdict for a defendant charged with a particularly heinous and brutal murder, the presiding judge pops on his death cap and orders that one of the jurors be taken down!

At least you can now see why I was so upset … about not doing Latin studies at Aspley High School in the early 1960 … so of course I had to look up sciocchezze assolute and it means absolute nonsense, complete foolishness or utter rubbish. Ouch! Worse still, estremamente offensivo means extremely/highly/deeply offensive and it sounds like I would have been in profundus stercus tauri if I had gone to law school instead of Queensland Agricultural College!

I’ll probably never know why His Honour didn’t italicise the first s in sciocchezze assolute – he’s entitled to do that if it helped him to emphasise my absolute/complete/utter nonsense/foolish/rubbish but I didn’t think my argument on the importance of the remote camera operator’s certificate to our lower-court pitch deserved such a stinging rebuke.

It must have had something going for it as a defence line if the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions counsel in his outline of submissions for appeal thought it a reasonable and sensible strategy to neutralise its importance by pitching the argument that the certificate was fundamentally a figment of my imagination! In dismissing my notice of appeal, Haddrick ADCJ doubled down on this reductio ad absurdum, restating the ODOPP counsel’s submission that our side’s assertion was “entirely speculative about the existence of evidence claimed to be in the possession of police and subsequentially withheld from the defence”. No such document ever existed, meaning it could never have been handed up anyway and the magistrate didn’t have to consider any material not presented at trial.

At appeal, I asked both the judge and our top cop’s counsel should I be concerned over the possibility that I could be charged with the serious offence of creating false official documents to gain some criminal advantage through such wicked doctoring. I was being facetiousata flaptrap maximus, of course, as that course of action would be quickly exposed as a prima farcical example of the aforementioned reductio ad absurdum and a pathway quickly set in train to a courtroom date that would quickly end a long life led criminally free.

And while I appreciate I got my bush lawyer’s certificate out of a Kellogg’s cornflakes packet, and my best guess is that both the judge and the commissioner’s counsel both attended a reputable law school and most likely did very well, I still honestly believe some lectures in basic logic would have helped both greatly.

A quick summary of earlier disclosures in this book: from the get-go, my solicitor said a magistrate had to consider the state of the speed signs on the day of my alleged speeding offence and I thought, quite reasonably, that two state agencies backed up that argument to the hilt by writing to me with both using very similar words to the effect that “the Queensland Police Service camera operator has certified the 40 km/h all day school zone speed restrictions were adequate and clearly visible”. And as recorded in earlier chapters, advice from associate and legal adviser Artificial Intelligence was almost entirely of the view that a magistrate would have been duty bound to consider our defence arguments based around that certificate and what it claims, if it had been papered up instead of papered over. It’s not rocketnavis scienta, is it?

Consideration:
Bush lawyer’s evaluation: The appeal judge’s arguments on grounds 1 and 2 are illogical, would, I truly believe, very baffle many first-day, first-year law students and are completely without merit.

Shortly I’ll outline why I believe, and am entirely entitled to argue in the court of public opinion providing I’m fair and reasonable and my criticisms are soundly based and in the public interest, that many of the judge’s other rulings were non excremental sherlockus, ignoratio elenchi, stercus tauri, altus profundus, stercoris cumulus, temporis mei perditio and when it came to who should be allowed to engage in criminal court business, divitibus solis reservatum!

Editor’s note: The meaning of made-up Latin words and phrases used in this chapter will appear at the end of the published book.

Don Gordon-Brown
The Bug‘s lifetime-appointed court reporter and ranter-in-residence

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