Random Access

Joe Batista says he is going to find a couple of “gangsta’ neighbourhoods” in Mississauga and put up posters: giant posters that say “Gangsters —Kill for Cash!” There will be a web site listed below so he can be contacted.
Maybe then, Joe figures, he’ll finally draw the attention of Peel Regional Police.
Batista has been quoted in both The Mississauga News and The National Post saying that he plans to issue his own “death list” in the wake of his father Antonio’s conviction for uttering a death threat against Ward 9 Councillor Pat Saito.
Before he and his family went into court July 27 to hear the guilty verdict that the younger Batista had already predicted, he told me, “If my father is found guilty, a new crime has been created by these idiots — the crime of satire.” He said he would issue his own satirical death threat list and expected to be charged by police as well.
“I’m not kidding,” he said.
Earlier, during the May trial, he told Post report Joseph Brean that he was interested in setting up an “assassination protocol” fund to which people could contribute if they wished to see a certain politician eliminated.
It was colourful and dangerous talk that he thought for sure would reward him with the confrontation with the law he so clearly desires. He sounds disappointed that the authorities have yet to contact him.
Batista is still livid that his 75-year-old father was convicted. His father is “insulted” that the judge suggested that Antonio doesn’t not know enough English or is not well-educated enough to have written a satirical poem. “I have an education,” says Batista the younger, who sounds like he wants to retry the case with him as the defendant this time around.
His father definitely hurt his own case by taking the stand and testifying that he didn’t know what satire was until he discussed it with Clayton Ruby, his defence lawyer.
He hurt it more in the tone and tenor of his remarks, which clearly indicated a personal animosity for Councillor Saito. He was deeply offended that Saito did not respond promptly to his complaints (because of an e-mail snafu she testified) and that she was on vacation for two weeks when he tried to follow up his inquiries.
Because his father is an immigrant whose first language is not English, “there is a double standard at work here,” says Joe Batista, who, like his father, ran a token protest campaign against Saito in the municipal election last fall.
“What happened to my father is nothing short of a dictatorship,” says Joe. “They are so close-minded to call his intentions criminal,” he said today in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “I call them revolutionary.”
“I cannot stand a society that tramples over the rights of its citizens and old people.”
So far his attempts to get himself arrested for his outrage have fallen short and Batista sounds as if he wants to remedy that right away. “Yes, I intend to be satirical in the delivery of my sedition,” he says.
If the police don’t call him soon, Batista’s ally and City Hall watchdog Donald Barber will officially complain about his behaviour to the police chief to set the criminal process in motion.
Although his father said outside court that he would appeal his conviction and Ruby is obviously anxious to argue at a higher level about the lengthy history of satire as a legitimate form of dissent, an appeal is not a sure thing.
It will be highly expensive and highly stressful for Antonio, who has prostate cancer and his wife Mina.
Joe Batista would like to spare his parents that, if he could.
Instead of putting his parents through the continuing ordeal, their son obviously wants to cast himself as the defendant in chapter two of this political/criminal drama.