“I fought the law and …” guess who won!

by Mike Bee

I haven’t written much for the last few weeks. The enormity of having to defend oneself before a judge in a district court – and at the age of 67 when you’ve never been in trouble with the law before – is not something to underestimate, even though mine was not a particularly serious charge. It took a lot of preparation and then, both before and after, a certain amount of fortitude that tended to take away my energy for other things. Now, more than a week after it is all over, I hope that writing about my experiences in the Wellington District Court helps me to put it behind me in a good way and will be, at the same time, interesting to others who have not yet been privileged to have had such an experience. If, reading this, you are expecting your worst prejudices of the New Zealand justice system to be revealed, then … read on – things are never quite as they appear, and my own prejudices about what would happen were both confirmed and taken by surprise.

For a start, my charge was rather minor – being one of a hundred and eighteen New Zealanders arrested and charged with trespass at Parliament on February 10^th 2022. Most of them – for various mysterious reasons generally worked through in secret between lawyers – had their cases dropped, but mine, though it was pretty much identical to that of many of these, was one that was not dropped. Like others, I was offered what the police call “diversion”, which is having the charges dropped but accepting responsibility, which seems to be virtually the same as accepting one’s guilt and which anyone who believes they were acting rightfully at the time is not likely to accept.

Voices for Freedom, distributing thousands of donations that came towards them from all around the country, had arranged for us all to be represented by a lawyer in initial stages. If I’d played things strictly by the rules, that lawyer would probably have got me off, especially if I’d revealed what I kept to myself until the trial about how my arresting officer had made a major error in her statement concerning how she had come to arrest me. But I went a different route, deciding to contest the jurisdiction of the court and taking advice from one who has had some success in this. However, when I followed my friend’s directions, I discovered that what he told me would happen never did actually happen in my case. I therefore decided that at this point in my life I did not have the expertise to go down this route and withdrew from his advice, relying instead on my own abilitiesto state my case and my faith that this was a part of my destiny and that in the end, to use Saint Paul’s words, “All would be well.”

Then, impressed by a statement made on video by Brad Flutey after his court appearance in Whangarei, I engaged the services of two practitioners from the organization McKenzie Friend, who coach people who are appearing in court who, for whatever reason, do not wish to engage a lawyer. What I learned from them was very helpful, and I recommend this to others who wish to go this route.

There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing of statements of disclosure and hearings to set things up, and it all took nearly a year. Then, when a date was set and I had flown down to Wellington for it, the court was quadruple-booked and the whole thing never happened. Evidently, courts are a bit like budget airlines used to be when, expecting cancellations, these airlines used to deliberately sell too many tickets and leave passengers stranded when the cancellations they had expected didn’t take place. I – along with my two wonderfully supportive “cellbros” who had travelled down from Hawkes Bay to go through this with me – felt like one of those stranded passengers. Although we made a reasonably enjoyable day of it, there was nothing to be done but head for home, knowing that new tickets from Auckland would have to be booked eight weeks later and the whole thing prepared all over again.

The day finally came. I was determined to say all that I could regarding the reasons that I and many hundreds of others made the stand that we did but had been warned by my McKenzie Friend supporters that the Prosecution and Judge would do their utmost to shut this down. This was more or less what happened. The Judge in his summing up kept scrupulously to a few legal points that he had already decided in other cases: Was the order for us to leave Parliament Grounds legal? Was it delivered properly? Did I hear it? Did I have time to leave? In his eyes, it all came down to a matter of whether I heard the police warning or not, and, on that basis, the whole thing could have been settled in half an hour.

I had so many arguments to make. I genuinely cannot remember hearing the warnings, although I’ve seen them since on video. My two cellbros were brought in at the last moment as witnesses, though we hadn’t planned this, and said they never heard the warnings either, and the three of us made a great case for the general chaos and total pandemonium of being in the midst of such a situation – a life’s highlight if there ever was one in which we shared with a great many others total single-mindedness to what we knew was right and the conviction that we had to go against the law in order to put up a stand for freedoms that New Zealand was in grave danger of losing.

There was so much I wanted to show and tell, and much of it, as I had been prepared to expect, never saw the light of day. My arguments centred around not just the outer chaos but what I called the inner noise – the strength of conviction of what had brought us down to Parliament completely spontaneously because we had tried everything else, and coming to this place was simply our last hope. I repeated how we were motivated by the belief that the politicians would listen to us if we got in their faces and refused to leave, never thinking that every single MP would sign a piece of paper that stated they would comply with their Party’s wishes and not communicate with us. I spoke of Dr Matt Shelton who had delivered his warning of contamination in the vaccines on Parliament steps a few weeks earlier and who had been blocked from giving his message to the relevant health committee. I spoke of how we had gone with others to the Auckland Central Police Station because people in our area were being made ill from the jabs. I read out the heartless letter written by Ashley Bloomfield to a friend of mine who had lost the sight in one eye immediately after the first jab and was told that Ashley could find no reason why she be excused from taking the second. I went into the Bill of Rights and its two key guarantees that no one can be experimented upon or forced to take any medical procedure without their knowing consent (Article 10) and that everyone has the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment (Article 11). I appealed to the courts as our very last refuge of protection of these fundamental human rights. And I played a video of the police being expelled from Parliament Grounds the night before by a Maori person whose family had for long contested ownership of the land and had given us permission to be there.

None of this counted – the Judge held to his narrow legal reasoning that I had heard the warning and was therefore guilty. I compared the “rules” that Trevor Mallard had used against us to get us evicted to being like a rule not to drive over Grafton Bridge when your wife is in labour and you need to get her into Auckland Hospital in a hurry. I said these rules were minor compared to the enormity of the violations against New Zealanders that ruined the health of many (currently 8,600 cases of serious injury or death resulting from the so-called “vaccine” are on record with Medsafe) or drove them into bankruptcy and the loss of their homes when they were prevented from working. What I called my “Mahatma Gandhi” defence fell on deaf ears.

Or did it? I was found guilty of not leaving Parliament when ordered to but then inexplicably cleared of charges because I seemed to the Judge to be a good, sincere person who had not been violent and had conducted himself admirably in court. I heard this with a mixture of emotions, not particularly proud of myself at that moment, but also glad that it meant that the Judge had decided to exercise his discretion and discharge without conviction. Even the police Prosecutor – going against everything I had ever heard about prosecutors demanding the maximum sentence in every TV show I’d ever watched – recommended this. It was quite a surprise to me!

My McKenzie Friend helper texted back to me, “That’s a win, buddy – a discharge is deemed to be an acquittal!” but I couldn’t feel completely happy about it. The legal system just did not give me the room to manoeuvre that I needed for real justice to take place. Is that a confirmation that the whole diseased temple needs to come crashing down? Is it confirmation that I should have taken a different approach and done more to challenge the system? I will only say that of those arrested at Parliament, most who attempted that, failed, and I believe I was right in this case to hold true to who I am. In an extended family where lawyers and doctors (including one high court Judge) are prominent, I decided to exercise my personal freedom and go the orthodox route, and this was the result.

If there was success, it may have been in the Judge saying just before he made his summing up that I had given him much to think about. I don’t think he meant by that that he had to think much about his guilty or innocent verdict, as he had found a number of others guilty that week in similar circumstances, fining each one of them $500. My hope is that all the reasons I had given for why a sizeable minority of New Zealanders chose to put their own welfare aside and contest systemic injustice had opened his eyes to aspects of the whole situation that he had not been aware of before. (And yes, we were a sizeable minority, whatever the propaganda outlets say – a Stuff poll at the time found that one third of New Zealanders believed the protestors were doing the right thing to be camped in Parliament grounds.)

Probably I will never know what he made of my “Gandhi” arguments. However there is one thing that happened that makes me feel more optimistic about the end result of my case. The next day I was back in court to support another freedom-fighter who had been arrested shortly after me. This was a somewhat different case, as she was one of those who had been injured by the police during her arrest. As there will be more to follow, I’m not able to say much about what happened, except that the Judge – my same Judge who had been looking at all these trespass cases over the same week and finding everyone guilty – made a verdict of “prosecutorial misconduct” in this case. Evidently, the prosecution in their zeal to make a conviction violated the rules and tried to cover up the identity of one of the police involved in giving the defendant her injury. I would like to say more, but will say simply, “Watch this space!”

So, to sum this all up, I was guilty of not listening to a warning delivered into a seething mass of humanity by a man with a megaphone. But, as one of my Hawkes Bay cellbros often asked, “When will the real trials take place?” The trials we went through in the Wellington District Court were legal but not lawful in that the greatest breakers of the law still go free and have even been rewarded for what they’ve done. Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, Chris Hipkins – these are the real criminals who very obviously knew at the time that this was a fake plandemic and were prepared to knowingly break all rules of truth and values of humanity in ways that were fundamentally destructive to our country. On the basis of their fake Pfizer science, they instituted a system of apartheid, destined to leave a huge scar on the soul of this country for years to come.

Success so far has smiled upon them, and yet things haven’t gone entirely the way they planned either. I very much doubt if they are able to feel totally secure at night from the great fear that will be present in them of having to face one day the consequences of their actions.

Many of us, keeping our gaze on the victories of logic and common-sense taking place overseas which the paid-off New Zealand media refuse to show, are certain that real justice is still to come. Those who walk free today will be arrested and put on trial. On that day, I will be there watching – one of thousands of New Zealanders who were prepared to fight against injustice with every fibre of our being, secure in the conviction that truth always wins in the end.

Look for more articles by Mike Bee on SUBSTACK.
Subscribe for free to receive them as they are written at michaelburton999.substack.com