my gf is hosting a group presentation party (roulette may i add) and one of my most trusted sources is you (you, husborth) and so i wanted to know if you had anything to weigh in regarding how saul goodman could conceivably defend anakin/vader if he were put on trial. i think you're an absolutely and horridly fantastic writer so no matter how you answer this i would just love to read your introspection :>
the "(you, husborth)" portion of this ask fascinatingly implies that there is yet another borth that could be looking at this ask like no no no, i don't want to speak with busterborth. i wish to speak with husborth. not daveborth. husborth. this is a multiple borth household.
there are a number of genuinely good moves a potential Vader Defense Team could make, if there were theoretically a crack team of defense attorneys that wanted to touch him with a barge pole. a number of facts about vader's life are objectionable enough to have significant impact on his ability to stand trial; it's questionable whether he's physically or mentally capable, and while i don't think vader ever thought of it this way (it's way more complicated) there is a really solid argument that vader was under threat of death if he failed to serve the emperor, which he actually technically was. severance from the empire was tantamount to death, given that his armor is designed to force him to rely on imperial healthcare (this is extremely funny) and palpatine does quite literally torture him both as part of their evil hate religion, because he hates it when vader fails him, and i'm sure sometimes just for fun. to any sane person (read: this does not describe vader or palpatine) this describes a situation where it's very easy to believe the emperor would have killed vader for standing down.
now: i think the actual reality is complicated, messy, and very much Not That. i don't think vader stormed the jedi temple, for example, thinking, "shit, he's going to kill me." i think vader would have considered the idea of palpatine killing him a kind of mercy and/or justice and would be eager to achieve that end, but as such that was never on the table because palpatine wants his pet warhawk alive until there's another skywalker to take his place. i don't think vader often needed the impetus of palpatine threatening ungodly torture to go do horrible things; maybe sometimes, but vader was demonstrably capable and willing to do glorious murders without a knife being held to his neck, and he is infamous for having no self-preservation skills whatsoever. but a theoretical crack team of defense lawyers is going to latch onto what there's proof of, which is that vader got electrocuted by his boss and that easily could have killed him and probably usually came very close. and from a legal standpoint that changes things. hilariously though i think after a ton of other imperial war criminals are captured they try to use the, "vader would have killed me if i didn't give the order to carpet bomb seventeen hospitals!!!!" defense, and this could range from maybe holds water to really fucking funny. could you imagine the new republic prosecutor going, "but HERE'S the proof darth vader never even boarded your vessel!!!!!!!" scoreboard noise, crowd goes wild, etc.
another thing that would cast an insane amount of doubt would be, if said mythical crack defense team could magically unearth the documentation that anakin was born a slave, won by qui-gon in a bet, and curiously lacked a) Space Manumission Papers and b) any kind of actual income from the last quarter century, you have enough to cast some pretty decent doubt on this guy's culpability. this would be a herculean feat of research, and i doubt there is any singular capable defense attorney in all of space who wants to expend this kind of effort on a very famous war criminal who kills indiscriminately and seems to only care about his son and killing people. but i think when a lot of people think about defense attorneys there's a mistaken assumption that they're always trying to prove innocence - and a lot of times they are! - but this wouldn't be about proving innocence, it would be about proving that while vader is guilty, maybe a firing squad isn't the appropriate sentence if you can cast enough doubt on the idea that he was purely motivated by evil. i am not willing to get more into theoretical space court drama in this post. i just think it could be done. this is going to sound insane but justice is sometimes about other things than justice lmao.
moving on, this is not what saul goodman should argue. saul goodman should in fact argue that anakin skywalker's evil twin did it all.
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