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But you annoy the state at your peril.

The state does not like being found in the wrong. The state does not brook defiance by individual citizens.

The state has the money to never say die.

The OPP, with its infinite resources, appealed. Three lawyers from the Ontario Attorney General were dispatched.

The decision was appealed, and last month, the appeal court overturned the Carpenter-Gunn decision, finding that the judge had made “palpable and overriding error” and that the OPP officers were justified in arresting Fleming, both “to prevent harm” being done to him and to prevent a breach of the peace.

In other words, said the appeal court, the police had been arresting him for his own good, the ungrateful swine.

And the court ordered Fleming to pay $25,000, or about half, of the government’s legal costs of the appeal.

As a citizen of Ontario, of course, he was already paying for the cost of the action, as do all citizens. Now he gets to pay twice.

The trial judge’s legal error appears to be that she determined the OPP had prevented Fleming from “exercising his lawful rights of walking up Argyle Street {the main drag in Caledonia}” when, in fact, he wasn’t on Argyle Street.

Fleming had jumped off the road to the ditch and then onto the adjacent land – native-occupied, and thus sacred, land — in order to avoid the OPP cars rushing toward him at some speed.

This happened on May 24, 2009, three long years after the violent occupation of Douglas Creek Estates (DCE), a subdivision then under construction, by Six Nations protesters.