Law and justice

I went to the Magistrate's Court today, as I am officially charged with the 'summary offense' of failing to wear a bike helmet on a unicycle. It helped a lot to have been there before, and knowing bits of the proceedings that apply to 'offenders' like me.

Instead of seeing the Magistrate to explain as to why a unicycle is not a bike, although it was legally defined as one until 2009, I had a bit of a talk to some of the prosecutors. Paper is patient, it's perfectly possible to fill it with lots of contradiction without the medium being affected in any way. I lost my patience a bit, and still managed to pick some interesting information on the way.

The charge itself needs some intellectual detours to make sense. There is the mismatch between 'unicycle' and 'bicycle helmet', which could make people suspicious in first place. Then again, law is not about common sense. If common sense would play a larger role in everyday life, we wouldn't need a plethora of laws, which, according to the prosecutor I spoke to, can't be known in its entirety even by police men.

The charge contained a hard copy of the dictionary of Victoria's road rules, the green marked part defines a bicycle as plenty of things, including unicycle. However, the part marked in red states the version of the legal text, it is from1999.

The law applicable to the charge, referred to on the summary sheet, clearly states Road Safety Road Rules of 2009 as the bit I ostensibly offended against. Okay, I admit, once things get defined in the law to ease fining citizens, it seems unlikely that a law will change to reflect common sense again. The current version of the law reflects what determines a bicycle, and legally distinguishes between uni- and bi-cycle.

When I mentioned that I felt harassed by the treatment of Constable Tyrell, the prosecutor mentioned that Vic Police is entitled to do a lot more than just stopping me and taking my details. In a way, it seemed like in the Stanford Prison experiment, the person in uniform emanating a sense of entitlement and infallibility.

Superficially, the entire case looks more than ridiculous. Besides the cognitive dissonance required to consider a unicycle the same as a bike, using two versions of the same legal text in the same bunch of documents shows how little scrutiny for detail the people dealing with this charge displayed.

I never had a court case before, and being considered as an 'offender' fails to instigate any confidence in the legal system. My crime: unicycling. How outrageous. How socially inacceptable. How non-conforming.

I guess the implicit attempt to shift blame towards me got my Liver Qi rising. While at least one Melbourne Bike Patrolero admitted his error, just like in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, 'officials' don't like admitting mistakes.

The shocking admission that police men 'don't know all the laws' and are entitled to random activities that seem to me just like harassment doesn't raise confidence into the local authorities at all. If common sense goes overboard, and people in uniform act like street robbers, the notion of a 'free' society has died.

So what the friendly prosecutor communicated was 'follow orders from police, no matter whether they are in line with legislation or not'. Don't feel harassed for being hindered in your ways, treated like a criminal, having to spend time and money to make those who 'protect the law' read the laws in first place. What a brave new world.