Brian Nichols, the world’s most rightfully-imprisoned black man, appeared Friday in the same courthouse where he killed three people on March 11 in Fulton County, Georgia. Asked to enter his plea by a very timid judge, surrounded by trigger-happy bailiffs and police, Nichols pleaded “déjà vu” in his case.
While his attorneys very politely reminded him he could only plead “guilty” or “not guilty,” though “not guilty” seemed an extremely unlikely choice, Nichols laughed off his odd feeling of having been through it all before.
“Sorry,” the very large former linebacker told the court, as they listened with wide eyes and trembling lips. “It’s just like, wow, I feel like I’ve been here before in some way. I have this whole memory of struggles with officers and gunfire and—anyway… guess we should get to trial and stuff. So, who’s the misguided people who are going to testify against me?”
The judge, who asked not to be identified or even revealed to the suspect, addressed the court from inside a large crate he or she had hauled up behind the bench, and suggested they put off the proceedings and gave the prosecutors a chance to build up a rock-solid case against the defendant—who, the judge acknowledged, certainly may very well not be guilty, for all we know.
A little more than a month ago, the gigantic nasty African-American Hannibal Lecter wrestled out of custody of court officers, secured a gun, and shot three people, including a judge, before making his way outside for a spree of carjackings and hostage-taking that eventually ended in his arrest. Numerous charges were added to Nichols’ already long list, which included rape, aggravated sodomy, and false imprisonment, the charges of the previous trial where the convicted badass attacked the court. It was the second trial on the charges for Nichols, after the first trial ended when the jury couldn’t come to a decisive verdict.
“Boy, I feel like quite the ass now,” admitted one of the holdout jurors from the first trial, who asked to remain anonymous out of embarrassment and fear of possibly being killed. “I owe a few of my fellow jurors some apologies now, that’s for sure. Back then I sure didn’t think him capable of rape and kidnapping, but now that I think about it, I was worried about him leaping into the jury box and bludgeoning me to death. I just assumed the two were mutually exclusive.”
Court officials took no chances with Nichols this time, bringing the besuited behemoth into court in leg irons, shackles, and wearing a global positioning device on his ankle that would self-destruct upon walking out of the courthouse area. For extra safety measures, the gray suit Nichols wore was also packed with gunpowder by deputies and a twenty-foot fuse trailed behind him, just in case he tried to make another break for it.
Bailiff Vigo Metzel was in charge of Nichols’ secure transportation to and from the courthouse.
“Some of us wanted to give him one of those half-hockey masks to keep him from eating people, but we thought that just made him look even more terrifying. No one would want to be on the security detail then. Besides, no one would volunteer to put the mask on him.”
When questioned as to why anyone would want to defend a client with so much stacked against them, including verifiable security footage from the very court where he’s going to be tried, Nichols’ attorneys, who also asked not to be identified, said that even though it was unlikely Nichols would go free, they wanted Nichols to know definitively whose side they had been on in the event he ever breaks out again.
In the meanwhile, Nichols has privately told his attorneys and the prosecution that he only made his escape attempt from the courthouse in March so he could find the real perpetrators of the crimes of which he was accused. If he had found them, Nichols said, he certainly would have killed them, too.