In 1984, George Orwell described Newspeak, the language of the totalitarian regime depicted in the book, in this way:

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English speaker of our own day (George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classics, p. 300).

It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is an exact description of the language spoken by the prosecution in the Scot Peterson case. Consider a few examples from a CNN story on closing arguments in the case. Ask yourself what language the prosecution and its witnesses are speaking. Whatever it is, it’s not intelligible as English or any other natural language. 

Claim 1: 

“In that moment, while he stood at those doors, every student and every teacher on the third floor was still alive,” Assistant State Attorney Kristen Gomes said Monday during closing arguments. “In that moment, choose to go in, or choose to run. And Scot Peterson chose to run.”

At no time did Peterson run anywhere during the event, and at no point has anyone ever testified that he did. In fact, the criticism made was just the reverse: that he mostly stood still at a location near the building. So Gomes is gaslighting the jury in the pure light of day. If she was under oath, this assertion would qualify as perjury, one of the charges made against Peterson. But she’s a prosecutor not under oath, so blatant lies are par for the course.* 

Claim 2:

“When I looked at him, he just had a blank look on his face,” former school Security Specialist Kelvin Greenleaf, who arrived at the scene with Peterson, said during his testimony last week. “There was so much going on, and I can imagine the stress and the pressure that he was under … and I just don’t think he realized pretty much what was going on.”

The legal question at stake is whether Peterson knew that Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, was in Building 1200. The witness says: “I just don’t think he realized pretty much what was going on.” Clear as mud. 

Hard to tell, but this witness really does know how to speak English. He’s trying to tell us about Scot Peterson’s state of knowledge. He tells us that Peterson was under stress–or rather, that he can “imagine” the stress Peterson was under. Bear in mind that we’re relying on a witness to guess the state of mind of another person, not the most reliable form of knowledge, and that the defendant’s freedom depends on the accuracy of this guess–a guess subject to the passing whims, lapses of memory, confabulations, narrow self-interest, and plain old spite of the witness. 

So did Peterson know? “I just don’t think he realized…” So he didn’t know? “…pretty much what was going on.” Pretty much what was going on? Or just plain what was going on? Come on, Mr. Greenleaf. What are you trying to say? English. Your language. You can do it. 

Let’s try again, re-wording Greenleaf’s claim to try to make some sense of it. We now know what happened, because the event in question happened five years ago. But did Peterson know the relevant fact at that time? Greenleaf: Well, pretty much what was going on was something I don’t think Peterson realized. 

That doesn’t really help, does it? Let’s strip the whole thing down to its essentials and make it make some sense. Q: What didn’t Peterson realize? A: What was going on. So then Peterson didn’t realize what was going on. Great. Clarity at last. But how does it help the prosecution?

Does the witness need a translator? Is he on drugs? Is he mentally challenged? The defendant is facing 96 years in prison. His freedom depends on the truthful testimony of witnesses like Greenleaf. But Greenleaf’s testimony is, at the crucial moment, “barely intelligible to an English speaker of our day.” It’s Newspeak, straight out of 1984. But it’s being uttered under oath in a court of law as something we’re supposed to take seriously, and something that could put a man behind bars for the rest of his life. How is this possible?

Claim 3: 

Broward County Sheriff’s Detective John Curcio, the lead investigator of the case against the shooter, similarly testified law enforcement is “supposed to go towards the shots” to locate and confront a gunman.

“The goal is to stop (the shooter) from killing people,” said Curcio. “And that doesn’t mean killing him. It means slowing him down, it means distracting him, it means anything so those kids can find safety.”

I can understand what Curcio is saying in the sense that I can understand the words that are coming out of his mouth. What I can’t understand is how a human adult–an officer of the court, an experienced police officer, sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution–could bring himself to say something this fucking stupid.From left, legal assistant Aaron Savitski and Assistant State Attorneys Steven Klinger and Christopher Killoran view video played in court during Peterson’s trial on Wednesday, June 21, 2023. Photo credit: Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP

How do you slow down or distract an armed gunman with a semi-automatic assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition without trying to kill him? What non-lethal method would work here? An angry letter? Loud music? Rocks? A dick pic? 

Set aside the total lack of evidence for–and total absurdity of–the claim that locating a gunman under these circumstances is possible: a single officer flying blind in space, lightly armed, without a ballistic vest, without knowledge of the gunman’s location, amidst chaos, debris, and confused throngs of “civilians,” playing hide and seek with a heavily armed gunman across an 184 foot corridor, in a three-story building, without functioning radios, as other units converge in a confused way on the scene, deprived of an incident commander.**  Suppose it was possible, and suppose you did it. What else could you do in that situation but have a shootout with the gunman until one of you shot the other, so that one lived and one died?

Not only does the prosecution want to insist that Peterson knew what he didn’t know, and should have done what was impossible, their pretenses extend even to what would have happened had he gone inside. In this insane fantasy world, you “confront” a gunman not by shooting him, but by “distracting” and “slowing him down” by unspecified means–means that magically spare both officer and gunman of danger while magically liberating everyone else from the same danger. I could excuse the magical thinking involved here if Detective Curcio was maybe five years old and had spent too much time immersed in movies and video games. But he isn’t. He gives every impression except a mental one of being an adult with a remunerative job and an exalted reputation. In truth, this is a person unfit to be a police officer. To put the point bluntly, I don’t know what, if anything, he’s fit to be. But here he is, the star witness for the prosecution. 

Claim 4:

This is at the same level of delusion and fantasy-thought as Curcio:

Prosecutors don’t believe Peterson was required to kill the shooter, Gomes said Monday, telling the jury, “The state did not expect Scot Peterson to go on a suicide mission.”

But he had a duty to “confront and engage,” she said, adding, “What was expected was for Scot Peterson to value the lives of those children as much as he clearly valued his own.”

He had a duty “confront and engage,” and then what? What was he supposed to do, and how? If he was to value his own life on par with those of the “children,” how was he to negotiate the obvious trade-off between his life and theirs when the bullets started coming his way in the tens and twenties of rounds? Don’t expect prosecutors like Gomes to conceive of such questions, much less answer them. Theirs is not to question why. Theirs is just to ensure that others do and die–as they suborn the fantasy that trade-offs and hard choices can be wished away at will. In the world they inhabit, clever words have the power to abolish hard realities. Empty talk fills the gap between the bullet and the bone. 

I can’t end on that note. Here is one of the defense witnesses:

Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Arthur Perry, who responded to the scene and said he stayed outside the building where the shooting occurred, testified he did not learn the details until later in the evening via news reports.

“I didn’t learn there was a shooter with victims inside the 1200 building until about 7 p.m. that night, when I looked on Fox News on my phone because there was no communication telling us what was going on,” Perry said, underscoring defense allegations of radio problems contributing to a communications breakdown at the scene, preventing critical information from being shared between agencies.

I like that. He learned it from Fox News. It epitomizes this country that our cops rely for their intelligence briefings on Fox News, and that the intelligence they get that way out-performs what they get through official channels.  That just about says it all. 

Acquit the man, for God’s sake. What a farce.

*June 29, 2023: In retrospect, it occurs to me that my argument here involves overstatement. I’ve left it uncorrected in the text, but I owe readers a correction. It’s not that Peterson did no running whatsoever at the scene. My point is that he did not “run” in the sense of fleeing the scene. Gomes implies flight while carefully avoiding using the phrase “run away.” So I stand by my claim that she was gaslighting the jury with the proviso that what she says is phrased so as to deceive and so as to avoid telling an outright lie. However we parse it, it’s not an honest, good faith claim.

**Note, by the way, that if one officer went in under these circumstances, only one could have gone in. Without coordination or functioning radios, there would be a very high likelihood of friendly fire. The prosecution doesn’t seem to have given a moment’s thought to such obvious tactical considerations.