Translated by Act for freedom now!
Letter by comrade Tasos Theofilou
A few days after the convicting decision against me by the three member felony appellate and the 25year sentence imposed on me for incidents that I only know about from television, I believe some questions of existential nature arise and some conclusions of political nature come out.
Beginning from the questions therefore, arises the query of how can a person, such as the chairman of this court, -which even assigning him to run a rural café would be a risky thing to do-, has such authority in his hands. How can it be that this person with the same morbid naivety that he tried my case with, could have tried and convicted hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people and this is not a scandal. How can it be that this obviously not very bright person hold in his hands thousands of lives. How can it be that the state is staffed by such inadequate people and we still cannot organize the revolution against it. How can it be that the prosecutor does not even consider it inelegant to take a few naps during the procedure and not even feel the need to take a look at the minutes before making her oration. Whoever watched the trial managed to conclude that her oration was probably about another case. How can it be that those who do not consider criminal justice the shame of humanity, but a “service”, tear it to rags transforming it into an underwear elastic. How can it be that a chairman and a prosecutor are not ashamed to state publicly that the defensive claims of the accused cannot be accepted because he did not state them to the special appeals interrogators, discrediting in the most responsibility-feared way, the supposed main stage of the procedure which is the trial.
But, some political conclusions are important. Such as that the court recognized the political dimension of the persecution indirectly with their decision, since if it did not recognize it it would have to acquit me, given that the indictment had collapsed from the first trial sessions. But it chose a politically -and not juridically- middle ground. A middle ground in order to balance the pressures applied from above, amidst the “antiterrorist” fever, with the pressures applied by below, pressures we apply in every small or big battle we all give. Pressures that even in the climate of autocratic onslaught are alive because of our decisiveness, militancy and solidarity. This part therefore, so much the solidarians who followed the trial as well as the movement’s journalists, prevented the arbitrariness of the chairman and the obscenities of the prosecution (which was balancing between right wing picturesqueness and the dangerous ignorance of criminal legislation), to remain in the tight limits of the court room putting a kind of brake to their nonsense. The court proceeded to a Pontius Pilate-like and responsibility-feared, surgically accurate solution, transferring to the appellate all responsibilities and all possibilities -even that of a counter-appeal-, as it happened in the end.
It is also important that it is not a decision which legitimized dna as evidence, since the object which my dna was allegedly found on does not exist, but a decision which legitimatises the police-juridical immunity which reached its zenith with the counter-appeal applied by prosecutor Drakos.
Also, it cannot go unnoticed that despite the fact the court did not need evidence in order to convict me for the robbery in Paros, simultaneously this lack was enough to exempt me of the charges of participation and integration in the CCF. So from a political point of view, it is important that this was not another step towards embedding of the ‘Marini’ dogma.
Thus I will remain in prison for a few more years with the strength given to me the conscience that just like every anarchist, I am not inside “unfairly”. I committed the crime which includes all crimes. In the class war I took position with those who have been wronged. Prison for an anarchist is not a punishment but one more field of struggle. There is no room for disappointment only stubborn intensification going forwards. Until the destruction of the last prison, from Attica to Koridallos, from Pelican bay to Domokos, from Guantanamo to Amigdaleza.
Tasos Theofilou
Domokos prisons
24/2/14
http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=16316