Writings from a Greek Prison. Tasos Theofilou
after the hunger strike of the members of the Network of Imprisoned Fighters. The question that arises is how the Department of Forensic Examinations (DFE) can base their reports (and consequently how the court can possibly validate these reports through their decisions) on the Short Tandem Repeat (STR) method in order to identify offenders, when the developer of this method himself clearly states that it should only be used to disqualify suspects and not for identification purposes. How is it possible that this method is still used in Greece, when in the United States, the country that first introduced it in 1980, it’s been deemed unreliable given the number of errors throughout the years? How is it possible that the laboratories of the DFE received an ISO certification only in 2014 while hundreds of people (myself included) had already been charged and convicted based on examinations that were conducted in uncertified laboratories?
In my case, there are specific circumstances that reveal an unrefined manipulation, since the one and only piece of evidence my conviction is based on is some genetic material detected on a hat—one that supposedly fell off a robber’s head while he was fleeing. It happens to be a hundred-percent match to my genetic type. There are two important details though: (1) nothing can substantiate the fact that a hat fell off the perpetrator’s head; (2) the photos of the crime scene taken by the police have captured every detail, however, no picture of this notorious hat seems to exist.
The hat appears in the photos of the findings taken at the Police Department of Attica (PDA). Based on the documents provided, it was sent to the PDA by the Police Department of Paros via post, on a different date and following a different route from the rest of the findings. Despite the manipulative questions formed by the presiding judge, Mr. Hatziathanasiou, and despite the illegal and admitted “preparation course” provided by the prosecution (a fact that Mr. Hatziathanasiou chose to gloss over with his sarcastic statement “no worries, this happens sometimes”), the prosecution witnesses’ accounts contained so many inconsistencies that the very existence of this hat was never proven.
Secondly, the DFE report, which magically concludes that my DNA is a hundred-percent match, states that the inner side of the hat was tested with the use of cotton swabs but fails to specify the type of tissue tested. It does not mention if the tested sample was sweat, blood, sperm, skin cells, saliva or something else. The significance of this detail is expected to be known to even a first-year biology student, and even more so to a chief executive of the DFE. As a matter of fact, the report submitted by the DFE, which follows me in all the stages of this judicial procedure, from the interrogation, to the Court of Appeal, is brazenly inconclusive and in reality, compares my DNA sample (which was collected by means of violence at the Anti-Terrorist Unit premises) not to some other specified tissue but, literally, to thin air. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this method revealed a hundred-percent match. And this is yet another reason why none of the DFE “scientists” dared to appear at court as witnesses to defend their bizarre theories. Because, had they done so, we would have come to the conclusion that even tarot cards are more reliable than the DNA methods used by the DFE.
My arrest is part of a crusade against the anarchist movement, launched and orchestrated by the law-and-order milieu: journalists, the Anti-Terrorist Unit, prosecution investigators, and wannabe Supreme Court judges. It is a crusade that dates back to 2009, when the dismantling of Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire was put forward as a pretext. A “vacancy” arose from the case of Nea Smyrni back in 2010.1 A vacancy that the Anti-Terrorist Unit thought I “rightfully deserved,” when in August 2012 a citizen was fatally injured in his attempt to prevent the escape of the robbers of Alpha Bank in Naousa of Paros Island. They based my “informed appointment” on an actual meeting I’d had back then [in 2010] with my friend and comrade Kostas Sakkas at an eatery in the neighborhood of Kallithea, as well as on an imaginary meeting with the then [in 2010] unknown to me but now comrade, friend and co-prisoner, Giorgos Karagiannides. It was a golden opportunity to slander the anarchist movement by profiling it as a mob of ruthless and bloodthirsty individuals.
It took the mobilization of all the mainstream media outlets broadcasting my arrest exclusively, striving to make the scenario appear plausible for a few days. For an entire week they presented me as a ruthless murderer. Photos of me went viral on the Internet while my commission to the courts on Loukareos and Evelpidon Streets, respectively, were broadcast live on all TV channels. In the name of law and order, judges, the media, and the police violated my rights and disgraced the famed presumption of innocence in every possible way. The media-cannibalism I was subjected to breached the aesthetic limits of the postmodern Dark Age we now find ourselves in.
Of course, it was not just the authority of the media that pursued my conviction by means of abusing even my written works and my private life, cramming criminal stereotypes into my fabricated profile (especially that of the paranoid murderer); jurisdiction followed suit as well. It’s precisely the enforcement of media authority, after all, that made the lack of any evidence appear insignificant. Even the provocative statement at court: “Who knows, perhaps this man was not at the robbery,” which came from the then-commissioner of the Anti-Terrorist Unit, Mr. Hardalias, was thought of as less of a scandal and more of a statement that shouldn’t be noted in the minutes. It is a scandal because it was not just a statement that came out of his mouth spontaneously. It was a display of the power of a man and the service he represents in the space and time of a public trial. It is a scandal because he chose this arrogant way to manifest the absolute power that his service enjoys. He actually implied with cynicism: “I don’t care if he was or wasn’t at the robbery. I don’t care about minor issues like evidence. I have my reasons to want him in prison. And he shall be in prison.” This development came as no surprise given that the suppression of the anarchist movement had been assigned to the Anti-Terrorist Unit as its sole and exclusive responsibility.
The Anti-Terrorist Unit is a police service that enjoys provocatively preferential treatment by the media, to the degree that crime news informs case files and is considered valid evidence of guilt. Of course, we shouldn’t have expected much more from the presiding judge, Mr. Hatziathanasiou, whose argument for my conviction on all charges went as far as to include the fact that I tend to use an electric razor—not a blade—during the freezing winter in Korydallos prison (meaning that, since one perpetrator appears to have no facial hair in the pictures taken by CCTV cameras and since he’s disguised, then it must certainly be me!). He also felt the need to include that I haven’t served in the Army and that I haven’t read Genet’s books. Needless to say he concurred with the draftsman of my criminal indictment, that my collection of fiction stories, ΠαρανουαρΙκό [Paranoir], as well as the crime reportage found in tabloids of the poorest quality, such as Proto Thema, should be considered valid documents substantiating my guilt. Likewise, we shouldn’t be taken aback by the prosecutor, Mrs. Oikonomou’s, attitude. She simply thought it was … appropriate or even in line with her responsibilities perhaps, to nap during most of the proceedings. It came as no surprise that she ended up reciting the document of my indictment when she was called to declaim her proposal.
These were, more or less, the conditions of my trial at the Court of First Instance. The political circumstances had placed the anti-terrorism witch-hunt at the top of the previous far-right government’s agenda. The Minister of Justice and former public prosecutor, Mr. Athanasiou, announced his intentions to introduce high-security prisons for terrorists within the first one hundred days of his appointment. The Anti-Terrorist Unit arrested Kostas Sakkas every other day with silly pretenses, forcing him to become a fugitive.
Today the political circumstances are different. Even if the new government in power is in charge of implementing ruthless austerity policies, its audience is more progressive, which means the anti-terrorism/anti-crime/anti-immigration pledges are not put forward as top priorities. The government has symbolically (if not actually) invested in the repression of white-collar crime. This is the case despite the Ministry of Justice’s reluctance to openly confront the law-and-order lobby of the country. The Ministry of Justice uses deceitful tactics, voting for progressive laws and simultaneously using wording that allows judges to evade their imposition. They don’t dare ensure that the rule of law applies in jurisdiction—it remains provocatively unregulated and open to extreme fundamentalist conceptualization, interpretation, and abuse of the monstrous Article 177 of the Criminal Procedure Law. This is related