Prosecution's Arguments: Spread wide and not wide spread
Prosecution's Arguments: Spread wide and not wide spread
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 27, 2026
What happens when a comma, a hyphen, and a courtroom walk into an international tribunal? Who wins the ensuing argument: grammar or gravity? The premise of this essay is simple and deliciously petty: the prosecution at the International Criminal Court insists on "spread wide" rather than "wide spread", and in that insistence we find a microcosm of legal hermeneutics, rhetorical theater, and the human appetite for categorical certainty. Is this a linguistic quibble or a prosecutorial manifesto? Is it a matter of syntax or of strategy? And, most importantly, can one make a convincing case that the fate of international justice hinges on the placement of an adverb?
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The Linguistic Premise as Legal Premise
At first blush, the difference between "spread wide" and "wide spread" seems trivial, the sort of thing one corrects in a footnote or a copyedit. Yet law is allergic to trivialities. The law prefers to germinate its grand narratives from the tiniest seeds of language. Why? Because words are the scaffolding of legal reality. If you can persuade a judge that a phrase means one thing rather than another, you have, in effect, persuaded the world to tilt a fraction of a degree in your favor. So when the prosecution insists on "spread wide", it is not merely choosing a locution; it is choosing a metaphysics.
"Spread wide" suggests action, a verb-driven expansion, a deliberate unfurling. It is kinetic, almost theatrical: arms outstretched, maps unfolded, strategies deployed. "Wide spread", by contrast, reads like a label, a noun phrase that has been flattened by taxonomy. It is the difference between a verb that does and an adjective that describes. Which of these is more damning in a courtroom that prizes intent and orchestration? Which better supports a narrative of coordinated policy rather than coincidental similarity?
Is the prosecution arguing that the harm was spread wide—that actors intentionally disseminated a pattern—or that the harm was wide spread—that it happened in many places, perhaps without a single mind behind it? Which of these is easier to convict on? Which of these is more rhetorically satisfying to a prosecutor who must make the abstract feel like a plan?
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Satire as Methodology: The Kaufmann Interlude
Enter Kaufmann at the ICC, a figure who, in our anecdotal retelling, treats legal argument like a late-night monologue. Kaufmann is not merely a lawyer; he is a performer who understands that the courtroom is a stage and that the audience—judges, clerks, observers, the world—wants to be entertained into agreement. He paces, he pauses, he pronounces "spread wide" with the solemnity of a liturgist and the relish of a chef unveiling a signature dish. He asks, with mock incredulity, whether anyone could possibly mistake a verb for an adjective when the fate of millions is at stake. He smiles as if the grammar itself were guilty.
Is this mockery unfair? Perhaps. But satire is not cruelty; it is a diagnostic tool. By exaggerating Kaufmann’s theatricality, we expose the performative scaffolding of legal persuasion. The courtroom is not a laboratory of pure reason; it is a theater of conviction. Why else would a prosecutor spend precious minutes on the cadence of a phrase? Because cadence is conviction’s cousin. Because the human mind is persuaded as much by rhythm as by reason. Who among us has not been swayed by a well-timed pause?
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Esoteric Footnotes and the Joy of Overinterpretation
If the prosecution’s insistence on "spread wide" is a rhetorical gambit, then the defense’s counter—if it exists at all—must be equally creative. The defense might argue that "wide spread" is the more neutral, descriptive term, one that resists imputing a single, orchestrated will to a complex set of events. The defense might summon linguists, anthropologists, and a retired crossword-puzzle editor to testify that language evolves and that meaning is a communal project, not a prosecutorial decree.
But the prosecution will counter with esoteric footnotes. It will cite obscure treatises on legal semantics, the marginalia of nineteenth-century jurists, and perhaps a medieval gloss that once distinguished between diffundere and distribuere. It will argue that the difference is not merely lexical but ontological: "spread wide" implies agency; "wide spread" implies accident. Which of these is more consistent with the evidence? Which better fits the mosaic of witness statements, satellite imagery, and intercepted communications?
Is it not deliciously absurd that international justice might hinge on a medieval gloss? And yet, is that absurdity not the very thing that makes law both maddening and magnificent? We litigate the past with the tools of language because language is the only instrument we have that can reach backward and reconfigure what happened into what it meant.
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Anecdote: The Clerk Who Loved Semicolons
Allow me a brief anecdote, because anecdotes are the spices of argument. There was once a clerk at an international tribunal who loved semicolons. He believed that semicolons were the punctuation of moral seriousness, that they allowed the law to breathe between clauses of consequence. One day he annotated a prosecution brief, changing "wide spread" to "spread wide" in three places, not out of malice but out of aesthetic conviction. The prosecutor noticed and, rather than correct him, adopted the phrasing. The defense noticed and accused the prosecution of linguistic engineering. The judges smiled and asked for submissions on the matter.
What does this tell us? That the smallest editorial choices can ripple outward into legal argument. That the human beings who draft briefs are not automatons but readers with preferences, quirks, and a taste for rhythm. That the law is, in part, the sum of these small human acts. Is that a weakness or a feature? Does the law’s reliance on human taste make it vulnerable to manipulation, or does it make it resilient because it remains tethered to human judgment?
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Rhetorical Questions as Evidence
Why do we ask rhetorical questions in courtrooms at all? Because they are the legal equivalent of a spotlight: they illuminate what the speaker wants the audience to see without demanding an answer. The prosecution asks: Could a campaign of violence be anything but spread wide when the same playbook appears in multiple theaters? The defense asks: Is similarity proof of conspiracy, or merely the echo of common human motives? The judge asks: What standard of proof will we apply to the grammar of culpability?
Rhetorical questions are not lazy; they are strategic. They force the listener to inhabit the speaker’s frame. They convert doubt into a stage direction. In the Kaufmannian performance, rhetorical questions are the drumroll before the verdict. They are the moment when the audience is invited to nod, to lean forward, to accept the narrative as inevitable. Are we being manipulated? Of course. Are we also being educated? Perhaps.
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The Esoteric Turn: Jurisprudence as Poetry
There is an esoteric pleasure in treating jurisprudence as poetry. Both disciplines care about cadence, about the weight of a word, about the way a line breaks. Both are concerned with the relationship between form and meaning. When the prosecution insists on "spread wide", it is composing a line of legal poetry intended to resonate beyond the page. It wants the phrase to echo in judgments, in academic articles, in the public imagination. It wants the phrase to become a trope.
Is that ambition unbecoming? Not necessarily. Law has always been an art of persuasion. The best legal arguments are those that feel inevitable after they are heard. They are the arguments that, once stated, make the listener wonder how they could have thought otherwise. The prosecution’s lexical choice is an attempt to make inevitability happen sooner.
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Humor as a Defensive Mechanism
Humor is the court’s pressure valve. It allows participants to acknowledge the absurdity of their enterprise without collapsing into nihilism. Kaufmann’s jokes—if he tells them—are not mere ornament; they are a way of humanizing the machinery of justice. When he quips about hyphens and hierarchies, he is reminding everyone that beneath the robes and the briefs are fallible humans who sometimes prefer a semicolon to a colon.
But humor can also be weaponized. A well-placed joke can disarm a witness, unsettle a judge, or make a complex argument feel simple. Is that fair? Is fairness the right metric in a rhetorical contest? Or is the metric persuasion? The prosecution will say persuasion; the defense will say fairness; the public will say spectacle. Who adjudicates between these claims? The judges, of course, who must translate performance into precedent.
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Conclusion: The World According to Words
So what have we learned from this linguistic duel? That words matter. That the difference between "spread wide" and "wide spread" is not merely typographical but philosophical. That a prosecutor who insists on one phrasing over another is doing more than pedantry: she is shaping the narrative through which the world will remember events. That Kaufmann, with his theatrical pauses and semicolon fetish, is not a mere comic relief but a reminder that law is performed as much as it is reasoned.
Is this a scandal or a revelation? It depends on your temperament. If you prefer law to be a machine of pure logic, you will be dismayed. If you accept law as a human art, you will be fascinated. Either way, the next time you read a judgment, look for the verbs. Ask whether the author chose action or description. Ask whether the phrase could have been otherwise. And when you find "spread wide" in a judgment, smile and wonder: who, in some dim office, loved semicolons enough to change the world?
After all, if the fate of nations can pivot on a satellite image or a witness’s memory, why not on a phrase that unfurls like a flag? Is that not the most human thing of all?
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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