[Tonia's note: I don't know whether to apologize or not, but these guys made me laugh until I felt I should go to confession.]
Samson – Headline: “Marine Arrested Over Japan Rape”
“Japan Rape”? Sounds like he raped the whole country.
Miles- Tokyo newspaper headline: “Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecute For Rape Of Motherland.”
I don’t know why I still exist in 1943.
Samson – Ironically, you didn’t exist in 1943.
Miles- “Bill Stickers Prosecuted for 1943 Japan Rape.” Subheader: “Miles Rassmussen found innocent due to nonexistence.”
…read aloud by a newsboy while I stand there, shifty-eyed.
Samson – We, the jury, do not find the defendant.
Miles - [Faking a Southern drawl] Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client is not a bad man. In fact, at the time of the rape, he was not a man at all, nor an embryo, nor a sperm cell. Like all of you, and your children, he was bits and bits of molecules and protein aggregates and collagen fibers found in separate places around the earth, in cows and grass and trees. Sure, what you see before you now is the result of a lifetime of eating meat and French fries, the systematic modeling and remodeling of muscle, nervous, connective and epithelial tissue from ingested foodstuffs. But just because he exists now, that doesn’t mean he existed back then!
Now I’m just a country lawyer. Like many of you, I enjoy nighttime walks in the Savannah air, buying my amino acids from Doc Cochran’s GNC, and cheering on Coach Heard’s boys in their lacrosse matches. All this big-city talk about motives and circumstantial evidence and posse comitatus just goes in one ear and out the other, fast enough to cool one of Miss Virginia’s fruit pies she sets on her windowsill every Sunday. But the simple fact is that DNA evidence shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that amid all the spliceosomes and tRNA samples, among the cell membrane lipid rafts at the scene of the crime that could belong to any mammal, Bill Stickers’ unique DNA fingerprint is all over Japan. My client is innocent.
Samson – [Also in a Southern drawl] Well, you’ve just heard my esteemed colleague on defense spin quite a yarn! Mr. Rasslemanian is innocent because he wasn’t yet born. I ask you, do we all just get to wipe the slate clean because, at some point in the past, we weren’t yet born? Would you like to find your paycheck a big fat Goose Egg because, you’re told, you weren’t even born when the company was founded? Of course you wouldn’t! That wouldn’t be fair t’all.
So, maybe the defense is trying to say that this line of thinking only works when we do bad things before we’re born. Maybe we just let people get away with rape and murder because of something that happened in their childhood, their momma and daddy weren’t nice enough to have them early enough to have committed the crime. Maybe we should all feel sorry for Mr. Ratmutton because he was born too late.
Well, I have been a District Attorney for 15 years, and there’s one thing I know about repeat offenders: the sooner you stop a rampage of violence the better. All those people saying we shouldn’t have gotten into World War II… how many lives could we have saved if we had stopped Hitler earlier? How many could have been saved if he had been stopped from doing evil even before he was born? I’m not saying Mr. Raspb’rrymountain is like Hitler, but does that mean he gets to get away with rape just because he wasn’t born yet? I think not.
