A Child v Cyrinus (an application)

Per Tordmuffin J

This is an application by the defendant to prevent certain tendency and coincidence evidence from being put before the jury. I have sent the jury away to take tea and sweetbreads until this matter is resolved.

By way of background, the Crown was leading evidence in chief from one Aengus Ling, the skipper of the sea-trawler "Los Pescados Cópula". He was retelling how, on the morning of the alleged crime, he had been following a school of tuna along the island coast, all the while keeping a vigilant watch on the shores for any natives in coitus horribilis. For though he is a simple fisherman, Captain Ling is also a man of God who perceives it his Christian duty to cure the Papuans of their wicked ways. If he happens to find any of them engaging in immoral acts, he promptly sets anchor and paddles to shore whereupon he burns them at the stake as a lesson to the others.

As an aside, I was so impressed by this man's vocation that I was compelled to inquire how he himself managed to avoid Satan's temptations on board a ship for so many months with only the company of a few handsome young deckhands. The Captain then revealed himself as not only a pious man but also an ingenious one as he described how a lonely sailor can easily craft a piece of abalone into a prosthetic pleasure box. If an abalone is not at hand, one can equally use the tubular body of a gutted squid (with or without the ink gland removed) in much the same way as one might use a sock full of vaseline.

As it transpired, Captain Ling was aboard his boat and in the course of witnessing two lusty savages interlocked in sin on the beach (this particular act was "the most vile he had seen" in his long campaign) when the alleged crime scene did veritably float by his way. As he tells it, he was busily fiddling with his perescope so as to confirm the events on the shore, when all of a sudden an eerie fog came over the ship, entirely obscuring his vision. His first instincts were to make for the row boat and continue to pursue the transgressors on the shore but as he did so his attention was diverted by a faint whimpering coming from the water starboard. Though he could nought see a thing, this experienced seaman knew at once that Los Pescados Cópula was not alone in those waters.

When the fog resided a bit, Captain Ling could make out a phantom schooner in the middle distance drifting towards him. The whimpering sounds seemed to be coming from some kind of banshee on top of the mast. It was dolefully singing "Que Sera" and seemed to be in an utmost pained and distressed state. Still the ship ghosted its way towards them and the Captain candidly confessed that about that time his sphincter did fail him, spilling a good load of gut-curry all over his sea legs.

Soon the ghost ship came to rest alongside the Captain's vessel and he was able to see that it was not a banshee ontop the mast at all, but rather a boy named Robert Barker (verily the victim in these criminal proceedings). As we know, he had been gruesomely impaled on the mast through his arsehole and was in the last agonising moments of his life when Captain Ling came upon him. Shortly thereafter, a seagull which had been circling him, pecking on the thick bloodshit running down the mast, stopped to perch on the boy's head, the slight addition of weight being too much for his shattered rectum to withstand, sending the mast crashing up through his body and out his neck. His little spotty head snapped right off and splashed into the ocean where it would have been torn apart by crabs.

Having observed the boy's demise, Captain Ling then made his next big discovery: that this was not a phantom ship at all but, rather, the far more terrifying "Floating Barbershop" of Cyrinus Nonser. In the local taverns the old salts would often relate a legend about a ship that was captained by a pederastic hairdresser that haunted the waters just beyond Commonwealth jurisdiction, appearing outside of the Papuan villages and hamlets offering the golliwog children 'haircuts' - but most had regarded it as just a myth. Yet we now know there was at least some truth in this tale and that the last victim of the Floating Barbershop seems to have been young Barker. But the question remains whether Cyrinus (who was later found by the Federal police lying unconscious in the hull of the ship, apparently caused by a methamphetamine overdose) is criminally responsible for his murder.

Now, it is at this point in the evidence that, in the absence of the jury, the defence has made its application. One of the principal pieces of evidence, first discovered by Captain Ling when he boarded the Floating Barbershop, is the hundreds of stuffed toy animals sitting on the sharp end of pool cues lying on the deck of Cyrinus's ship. There were also a number of other toys, Panda Bears mostly, found below the deck which, evidentally, had been previously sitting on a pool cue and were now hemorrhaging their stuffing which was all soaking wet with, what was later forensically identified as, the infamous sauce a la Cy. The Crown wishes to tender these stuffed toys as evidence depicting a tendency of the defendant to shishkabab small, furry things and the coincidence that Robert Barker, who might also be correctly described as small and furry, was caused to be deceased in a similar state.

However, the defendant says that this evidence should be withheld from the jury on the basis that it would be "unfairly prejudicial" and cited R v Papalonis for this principle. In that case, the defendant Papalonis was arraigned under the crime of necrophilia, having allegedly dug up the corpse of his former piano teacher and made unnatural union with it. He managed to have excluded from evidence the fact that, while on bail, he had been caught (and indeed confessed to) having intercourse with most of the cadavers in the morgue, including that of his former piano teacher who was having his head re-attached. I think R v Papalonis a sound authority for the defendant's application, as a matter of principle and policy, and therefore make the order accordingly.

The trial continues.