In a move that has sent a shudder through the corridors of British jurisprudence faster than a gin-less G&T at a garden party, convicted scoundrel Mangione has reversed his psychiatric defence mid-trial. The man who once claimed his brain was a 'worm-ridden cheese of delusion' now stands before the court a paragon of lucidity. Legal experts, those bedfellows of pomp and periwigs, are left scratching their powdered heads.
'This is a tactical volte-face of Shakespearean proportions,' quivered one bewigged boffin, his monocle popping from orbital shock. 'To abandon the insanity plea is to dance with the hangman on a tightrope of legal absurdity.' Indeed, Mangione's defence now rests on the flimsy pedestal of 'temporary aberration' which, to this correspondent's naked ear, sounds suspiciously like 'I was a bit tired that day.'
Let us peel the onion of this melodrama. The prosecution, a gaggle of grey-faced gorgons, had been bracing themselves for a torrent of Freudian froth. Instead, Mangione sat in the dock, calm as a cucumber sandwich at a vicarage tea, and pronounced his sanity with all the conviction of a man who has just discovered the difference between a chardonnay and a château. His barrister, a man whose suits cost more than my annual gin budget, argued that illness of mind is a 'spectrum not a switch' and his client had merely woken up on the right side of the straitjacket.
But what of the chattering classes? The Twitterati have already dubbed him 'Sane-again Mangione' and 'Psych-No-More'. One wag on the wireless speculated that Mangione's true madness lay in thinking he could fool a jury of twelve bakers, bankers, and bored housewives. Another, a criminologist with a fondness for alliteration, called it 'a catastrophic gamble with the grim gates of gaol.'
The moral of this farce? In the theatre of the courtroom, truth is a revolving door. Mangione has swapped the asylum for the arena, and now he must fight with the weapons of the rational. Will it work? Who knows. But as I sip my airport gin (a fine Bombay Sapphire, warm and sorrowful), I raise a toast to the sheer, glorious, bloody-minded stupidity of it all. The law is a donkey, and we are all just trying to ride it to the circus.
