Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

For 11 years now, inside prison, I have been constantly raving.
Many times I am in a coma, but I live.
The prison doctors find nothing wrong with me, and that is natural, because, first, four people are not carrying me, and second, my eyes are open.
I rave because thought is always delirious even if it is not named as such; at least I am entitled to say whatever I want, fortunately.
Neither intention, nor of course thought in general, can be “criminalized”.
I rave because I remember. I remember and shudder.
I rave because I try to measure the state of the judicial developments and of things generally.
I rave about the police and judicial system that runs wild in the witch hunt.
A mixture of incoherent accusations in order to achieve ulterior aims, without a trace of explanation and completely openly.
I rave because for eleven years they have been dragging me from the Areios Pagos to the Court of Appeal and back again.
I rave because I have won before the European Court and was vindicated, and they rave too, and for that reason they take revenge.
I rave because for two and a half years I have been entitled to regular leave and they reject it without cause.
The laws themselves rave in practice.
They waver between punishment and educational measures, depending on the way justice raves and perceives each suspect as suits it, the Innocent as guilty and the guilty as innocent.
They managed to destroy me and bring me into a delirium.
In reality, what was recorded were my psychological disturbances and fluctuations, through which I brushed against death without knowing whether it had left for good, and I made a critique of the social system and of judicial decay, which nearly cost me my self-destruction.
I neither played nor risked, and yet I lost, even though my psychological instability passes through fluctuations.
Fortunately the survival instinct prevailed, drawing courage from the extent to which the European Court vindicates me, making me an unseen “hero”, so that I will probably exist again as a “free man”.
I am a winner over “life” and “death”. That does not make me a “loser”.
A human comedy? Probably.
Let us not wonder why, of all mammals, only man bursts into tears as soon as he is born.
From the sudden collision with the polluted human environment? Nah!!! More likely because from the first moment begins this desperate struggle with the “injustice” that a Human Being may suffer, while he continually flirts with death and continually dies...

Vasilis Kanakis

V. K. was tried continuously from February 2001 until 2011, throughout the entire first decade of the 21st century, by our national courts, and the above essay summarizes what he suffered.
He was acquitted of almost all the charges for violation of the narcotics law and finally, within the framework of the same trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment for violation of that law.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), to which V. K. had applied, held that his trial had not been fair because it lasted for an unreasonably long period of time and condemned Greece to compensate him.
The Areios Pagos, after the ECHR judgment was issued, decided that when you are tried continuously for an entire decade and more, your trial is absolutely fair and no new review of the life sentence is justified, since it is correct, proportionate to the act and unassailable [nomika epilekta: “the Areios Pagos rejected a convicted person’s application”].
Consequently, V. K. hopes for vindication in the next life and, in the meantime, we will listen impassively to his cry of despair from inside prison, where, according to our medieval system, he is corrected and improved together with others...