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As great quotations go, it probably doesn’t even crack Abraham Lincoln’s top 10. Whether Derrick Harper ever considered the utility of Honest Abe’s homily is unknown. And possibly moot.

“The man who represents himself has a fool for a client,” is what Lincoln said.

For the past month, Harper, on trial for murder in Contra Costa County Superior Court, has been representing himself. His courtroom manner has been unorthodox at times. He kicked over a chair. He raised his voice to the judge in chambers. He got as close to getting under the skin of prosecutor Mary Knox as anyone ever will. Knox, skilled, experienced and unshakable, told Judge John W. Kennedy she feared for her safety.

That was two weeks ago. While Harper, 39, a Pittsburg man charged in the 2008 shooting death of Jesse Saucedo that allegedly resulted from a robbery on behalf of a prison gang, hasn’t exactly grown into the job, the temperature in the room has gone down a notch or two.

Closing arguments were Tuesday. Knox began, presenting a straightforward review of the evidence and asking jurors for a guilty verdict. Harper countered with one of the more unusual presentations you’ll ever see beyond the bar. (Closing arguments for Harper’s co-defendant Joseph Bradshaw, being tried by a separate jury, are Wednesday morning.)

Harper, wearing a white dress shirt and seated at the defense table, opened by telling jurors he was going to “read some things I wrote down (because) I’m not one who likes to entertain thoughts and lies.”

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Projecting his booking mug from 2008 onto a screen, Harper, who spoke of himself in the third person, asked jurors to recall various witness accounts of a chubby, stocky man, maybe Hispanic or white, with dreadlocks at the scene. “As you can see,” he said, referring jurors to the photo, in which his head was shaved, “Mr. Harper is not chubby or stocky. He doesn’t have dreads or twistees. Mr. Harper seems a lot thinner than he appears today.”

He sniped at Knox, calling her the “accuser,” and (while talking over the judge) charged her with “rudely interrupting” him with her objections. He called himself a God-fearing man. For validation, he cited instances in which he refrained from violence against those with whom he had conflicts.

At this point, we must point out that these courtroom rivals have quite a history. Three years ago, as he was being arraigned on human trafficking charges, Harper was so verbally abusive to Knox, the attorney on the case, that the judge ordered him to apologize. When she didn’t like his apology, she made him do it again. In March, Knox earned guilty verdicts in that case on an assortment platter of charges against Harper.

And this wasn’t the only time he has decided to represent himself. A week after his arraignment in 2014, he asked to take on a fool’s errand, saying, “My back’s against the wall.” A judge posed some basic questions about the law. Harper handled them well enough earn the go-ahead from the judge.

A few days later, he changed his mind and requested an attorney.

So Knox had to have sensed what she was getting into, not that she had anything to say about it.

But it would have been difficult to predict how Harper wound up his presentation Tuesday afternoon. He projected rows of acronyms (including J.U.D.A.S. and S.N.I.T.C.H.I.N.G.) onto a screen, deliberately decoding each one. At one point, he suddenly shined the green-dot laser pointer on the wall above the jury’s heads.

“Spider on the wall,” he said. Then he said it again. “There is no spider on the wall,” he told jurors. “When you looked up, you witnessed that. It’s not supported by the evidence. That’s exactly what you’re dealing with in this case.”

Knox offered a brief rebuttal argument, then the jury repaired to the deliberation room. And one would hope, a spider-free zone.

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