A few days after my conviction by the 3 member Felony Appellate and the 25 years sentence imposed on me for incidents that I only nknow about from television, I think that some questions of an existential nature ad some conclusions of a capital nature emerge.
Beginning from the questions therefore, emerges the conundrum of how a person, such as the Chairman of the Court, whom even letting him run a rural café’ would be too risky, could have such authority in has hands. How can it be that the same person with the same nefarious naivete he tried my case with, could have tried and convicted hundreds, mayby even thousands of people and this is not a scandal. How can it be that this clearly unintelligent person holds thousands of lives in his hands. How can it be that the state is manned by such incapable people and yet we cannot organize the revolution against it. How can it be that the Prosecutor does not find it inelegant to take naps during the procedure nor even feel the need to take a look at the minutes before they are read out. Whoever watched the trial could conclude that her closing statement probably concerned another case. How can it be that those who do not consider penal justice a shame of humanity, but a ‘service’.
Tear it to pieces demoting it to a piace of stretched elastic underwear. How can a Chairman and a Prosecutor feel no shame in stating publicly that the defence claims of the accused cannot be accepted because he did not testify them to the Special Appeal interrogators, discrediting the alleged main stage of the procedure which is the trial, in the most absolving of ways.
However, some political conclusions are important. Such as that the cout, with its decision, indirectly recognized the political dimension of the prosecution, since if it did not it would have had to acquit me, considering that the charges had collapsed from the first sessions. But the court chose a political – and not a judicial – middle solution. A middle solution in order to balance the pressures applied from above., amidst the ‘anti-terrorist’ fever, with the pressures applied from below, pressures we apply in every small or big battle we all give, pressures that even in the climate of the autocratic onslaught are alive thanks to our decisiveness, militancy and solidarity. This part therefore, the solidarians watching the court as well as the journalists of the movement, obstructed the arbiters of the chairman and the vulgarities of the prosecution (which was somewhere between far-right paragon and dangerous ignorance of the penal legislative system), and kept them within the tight limits of the courtroom putting a relative break on their ramblings. The court wnt for a Pontius Pilatus-like absolving and surgically accurate solution, transferring all responsibilities and possibilities to the Appellate Court, even that of counter appeal, as happened in the end.
It is also important that it is not a decision that legitimized DNA as evidence, since the object on which the DNA was allegedly found does not exist, but a decision that legitimises the police-judicial impetuousity that reached its reached its zenith with the counter-appeal issued by prosecutor Drakos.
Also, it cannot go unnoticed that although the court did not need evidence to convict me of the robbery on Paros island, this lack of evidence was also enough to acquit me of the charges of participation in the CCF. Thus, from a political point of view, it is important that another step wasn’t made towards the Marini dogma.
So I will be in prison foa a few years still with the strength given to me by the conscience that, as every anarchists, I am not inside ‘unfairly’. I committed the crime that includes all crimes. In the class war I took a position with the tormented. Prison for an anarchist is not a punishment but one more field of struggle. There is no room for disappointment, only stubborn going forward. Until the destruction of the last prison, from Attica to Koridallos, Pelican Bay to Domokos and Guantanamo to Amygdaleza.
Tasos Theofilou
Domokos prisons
24/2/2014