When justice is a remote island far away

My daily struggle to access the court system with tragicomic anecdotes

May 31, 2025

I am taking the British State to the High Court to test whether its Single Justice Procedure is real law — or just a simulation.

One reason is simple: I want to experience the legal system at its higher levels for myself, at a cost I can likely afford. My little Canon printer, bought for $40 from Walmart, has burned through hundreds of dollars in ink these past two weeks. It’s already halfway through its expected lifespan after printing six full bundles of documents. It runs out of black or colour at random, so each print job becomes a micro-battle of reprints and ink swaps.

But that’s the easy kind of problem.

Today, my two bundles arrived in London. I called to pay the £174 filing fee. After 30 minutes on hold, I reached an agent. She took my card details, then there was a quiet, crestfallen moment: she’d charged me the wrong fee. I was put on hold again while she asked someone how to fix it. I’m now £646 down due to a duplicate charge — which I’ll get back — but only because a generous patron had just topped up my support fund. Meanwhile, my U.S. mobile was burning through prepaid credit on an international call. And yes, cat and dog hairs are now embedded in the bundles. These are the kinds of obstacles professionals never have to face.

The court system is hostile terrain for litigants in person. There’s no online payment form. No portal to track your case. No confirmation of issue. No accommodation for being overseas. No margin for paperwork error. Just an email address — with response time unknown.

I assembled the digital bundle — at the cost of another £130 software license to stitch PDFs — only to find I need another tool just to get the bookmarks to open by default. That software’s password reset function doesn’t work either.

My father worked for an airline. With staff travel, you used the product. If you work at a supermarket or restaurant, you eat the food. In an auto plant, you’ll get a discount on the car you build. But in the legal system, there's no such feedback loop. If judges had to use the courts like ordinary people, they’d be shut down in a week.

The remoteness, the coldness, the procedural sadism — all part of the terrain. If “administrative justice” were a commercial service, it would have usable workflows, guided forms, and safeguards against predictable errors. It doesn’t. It feels broken — because it is broken, when measured against almost any other modern experience.

I now have seven days from the date of issue — assuming I filled in the forms right — to serve the other parties. That’s tight, being in the U.S. while they’re in the U.K. Only the police have told me where to serve documents. The court and prosecution remain silent. I may be facing one of the most complete procedural blackouts of any defendant in the country. And yet, unlike most, I am armed with AI — and determined to audit this automated conviction system from the inside, while publishing its failures in real time.

There is no evidence of any crime. No complainant. No victim. Just a motoring charge and a demand for compliance and money. That’s what makes this case optically clean — ideal for testing a process that assumes obedience, not lawfulness.

The court didn’t email me today. So this is my first “free” weekend in weeks. Just 750 pages to paginate by hand, and 200 exhibits to re-label across three remaining bundles.

The consolation? They’re in a trap.

If they “convict” me of a non-crime with no evidence, in a non-court, under a non-process, brought by a non-prosecutor — it’s not me that’s on trial. It’s them. Even the High Court is being audited — from the outside. If it cannot hear a case about the existence of a court in law, it has effectively ratified the abolition of constitutional law in Britain.

Geddes v Justices at Carlisle is not a complaint. It’s a stress test.

Lawfulness or control? The State has to choose.

And it has to do it in public.

It shouldn’t be this hard to force the question. But it is. Because asking “By what authority does the Crown act?” is a dangerous question. It can get you into real trouble.

I’m acting from a different frame — arguably from a higher law: covenant, Logos, Christ. That’s disconcerting to judges who’ve spent the last few years somewhere between inert and complicit in the slow-motion genocide of the Covid era.

They know this. They feel it. That’s why this case is dangerous. Because if the system still has any pulse of conscience, it knows it’s being watched.

Something bigger is stirring. I may be swept away by history. But these essays — and the thousand inconveniences behind them — will remain. A testimony to what it’s like to try and lawfully test the system that says it is lawful.

Even if that means being put on hold for 30 minutes to be overcharged by £646 — just to ask if the court exists.