Now, Your Honor, we have to circle back to the phrase that the prosecution is oh so conveniently ignoring. “In Minecraft”. You all know what Minecraft is, right? Right? I see, ok then.

Allow me to enlighten you; it’s a video game that allows the player, or in this case my client, to build imaginary buildings, create non-playable characters, and he can… if he wants to! He can destroy them.

Now say my client creates a building that resembles Sheriff Chitwood’s place of residence, ok? I mean, it could really resemble any house to be honest. It has walls, a door, all that jazz. Maybe my client was feeling a bit creative and created a nice white picket fence to go with it.

Now say my client created a non-playable character who he named Mike Chitwood. Maybe he saw Sheriff Chitwood on the news and thought, wow, what a swell guy! I like him so much that I’ll create him in Minecraft!

Well, one day my client woke up and saw that his whooole landscape that he had meticulously made in Minecraft had been destroyed, yes, DESTROYED by the non-playable character named Mike Chitwood! How would you feel? You spend hours and hours building this BEAUTIFUL structure in Minecraft, and this non-playable character that you YOURSELF had created with your own TWO HANDS has destroyed it, quite literally, overnight!

Wouldn’t that make you so angry, so totally furious that you decide to talk about this situation online with other likeminded folks who also play Minecraft?

What I find here, Your Honor, is a case of unfortunate coincidence. A coincidence, that if WRONGLY prosecuted, will set a precedent that anyone who plays Minecraft could go to jail! Do you know how many people play Minecraft? Not just adults, like my client here, but also children! Think of the children, Your Honor!

Do you want them waking up every day, scared to death of playing Minecraft because they think that they will go to jail?! Is this the kind of world that we would want to live in?