NOTE: the contents of this fictional retelling have been taken from trial transcripts. Some details have been changed or omitted to ensure privacy.
Sidney Scofflaw got up to the stand.
“You are Sydney Scofflaw, aged –, living in –? And you are a second-year student here at Osgoode, where the Osgoode Supreme Court is holding trial?” said the judge.
“That’s right,” said Scofflaw.
“And you were on summer vacation in, and I read: Italy, Switzerland, Singapore, and…Oshawa, Ontario. Oh, and Toronto, Ontario. A long trip, to be sure. And somehow you managed to break the law in every single country you visited.”
“Well…”
“Do you deny that?” demanded the judge.
“I submit to the court that there was no mens rea,” said the luckless law student.
“I’m not completely sure you understand the meaning of the term, Sydney. I don’t know if you did in class, either.”
“Sorry, professor –,” said Scofflaw.
“Now, let me just run through the statement you gave the court earlier,” the judge went on, “you were working as an intern this summer for the reputable firm St. Hushar, Koizumi, and Hochstapler, LLP, dealing with metaphysical law. MyCareer turns up the strangest job offerings, doesn’t it? But then it came upon you to apparently use one of their experimental prototypes, a device which the experts in the court tell us is called an “interlegal modulator”, designed to determine whether or not the person in question believed they had committed a crime?”
“No, professor. But I was training on it. Ms. Janet Koizumi, my supervisor, said it would take into account cultural biases, whether or not something would be considered a crime elsewhere, and could be used to detect that for use in their defence.”
“And did it work?”
Scofflaw looked sheepish. “…Not exactly, professor.”
“‘Not exactly’?”
“The mechanism reversed,” Scofflaw explained. “Instead of recalling whether or not the crime was committed in the minds of our clients in different places, I was…sent to places where the things I was doing were criminal.”
“I see. So, this point about…Singapore?”
“Well, I’d gotten this chewing gum–”
“Italy?”
“I was frowning. I didn’t realize I’d end up in Milan!”
“How about the matter in Switzerland?”
“Professor,” Scofflaw persisted, “it was four fifteen in the afternoon when I flushed the toilet. I had no idea about the ban on toilets being flushed after 10pm in apartment buildings in Bern!”
“None?”
“Well…I may have been studying something about a noise complaint from a client at the time…and the client may have been from Bern. But the thing in Oshawa? I was building a treehouse for my nephew here in Toronto. And I actually did pay the $250 fine for that! Which was absurd, how was I to know the tree would come with me? I didn’t even have the device, it just…left some sort of background radiation, or something. But I have had no incidents of jumping into crimes since this August last.”
“Alright, alright,” said the judge, holding up a hand for silence. “All of this makes some degree of sense. None of these are particularly terrible matters, after all, my own cultural biases notwithstanding. But there is one question that remains, Sydney.”
“Yes, professor?”
“What circumstances could possibly lead you to be caught dragging a dead horse down Yonge Street on Sunday, August 8th?”
“…how much time do we have?”