At the Round Table: Two Hours, Eight Strangers, and My Case Told Out Loud

From the rectification file · 12 November 2026

On Wednesday 11 November, Remembrance Day, I sat down live with Sharifah Hardie and six other guests on The Round Table Talk Show. There was no script and no panel, just eight people at one table. In two hours we went from a landlord's metal gate in Taichung to epilepsy, prison psychology, rape crisis work, ancestral healing, cancer, kindness in a grocery store and a rock on a trail in Nepal. I went on to talk about my case. I came away having learned more from the others than I said myself.

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Who was at the table

What I said

I told them the short version. I opened a little school in Taichung at 28 with a fair amount of ego, and losing it has humbled me. I am not looking for vengeance. Sharifah's opening question was about how often people are told to just get over things, and that fit my case. Most of the guests had been told to let something go and had decided to stand up for the next person instead.

“My pain need not be in vain.”

— on the show, and in every conversation about this since

I told them about the fifteen years in Taiwan: the company I built, my godson and the people who are family to me. Then the return to New Brunswick, where I could not find work. The silver lining was being with my grandmother for the last year of her life. Now I teach children every afternoon in Phnom Penh, and it has been good for my soul. I said the reason I keep talking about this is simple. People living abroad need to know how exposed they are. I never thought this could happen to me, and it did.

I also admitted on air that Claude, the AI that helps me keep this record in order, had told me to stick to the facts and keep certain words out of it. Then I used one of those words in my first two minutes. Sharifah's answer was “we are the humans,” and she was right. The record below is the version Claude would have wanted.

Later I shared an old poem I used in one of my first lessons in Taiwan. It begins “I hold it true that thoughts are things.” Its point is that what we hold in mind goes out into the world and comes back. I said I believe that, given time, and a little effort here and there in what I call my rectification folder, things that were wrong can be put right.

What I took from the others

• Listening. Robert, David and Queen all came back to it from different directions. David said his degree on the wall does less for people than simply listening to them. Robert said our need to be right gets in the way of hearing anyone. Queen described standing outside a library with a distressed young woman and just listening, until she softened and said thank you.
• Systems and people. Jeff and David described legal and prison systems that push the people inside them to treat others as cases to process. They also described the moments when someone inside the system decides to treat a person as a person. Jeff told of one such moment from his own practice, when the lawyers on both sides agreed to spare two children a trial.
• Even a rock has spirit. On a trail in the Nepal Himalayas, Jeff went to kick a stone out of the way. His guide, a member of the Rai people, gently stopped him and said that even a rock has spirit. Jeff has tried to live by that since.
• You have a voice. Mason has spent his life feeling that he didn't have one. He closed the show by saying he does, and so does everyone listening.
• Small kindness. Angela told of speaking to a stranger who was crying in a grocery store, and how much a few words can mean to someone at the right moment.

None of it was about Taiwan, and all of it was. A courtroom where the defendant can't follow what is said about him is a place where nobody is listening. That is the whole of what I have been trying to say for four years.

Why it belongs in this file

Everything else published on this case has been written for a particular audience: lawyers in JURIST, workers' families in Magdalene, the language industry in MultiLingual, and interpreters on The Translation Podcast. This was the first time I told it at a table of ordinary listeners: a psychologist, a counsellor, a coach, a retired lawyer, a community founder and a man with epilepsy. They had no stake in Taiwan's courts, and they understood the point straight away.

The record, stated precisely

The courts found that in 2021, during a dispute with my landlord, I posted online documents that contained her personal data, including our lease, and that some of the material stayed online for months. My own account is that the lease itself was online for about two days, and that the witnesses I applied to call on that point, in March 2024, were never summoned. Taiwan enforces its Personal Data Protection Act criminally. I was sentenced to six months in prison, and the sentence became final at the Supreme Court on 16 October 2024. I could not read the judgments and no one ever translated them for me. I learned what they say only in September 2026. I am not asking anyone to retry the facts.

On the language: no document in the proceedings was ever translated for me. Some hearings were held with no interpreter at all. At others, a sworn interpreter was present and, by my account, conveyed a fraction of what was said. I had no counsel on appeal. The Supreme Prosecutors Office has twice declined to seek an extraordinary appeal, in December 2025 and in September 2026, and neither letter disputed any of this.

Where things stand

The documents

• The rectification file (rosscline.com/scam): every post on the case, oldest to newest.
• Press page: the case in sixty seconds, every case number, and how to book an interview.
• iLearn.tw/newsbrief: the documents, with working English translations.

Thank you

To Sharifah, for building a table where a Canadian English teacher, a Baltimore community founder and a retired Indiana lawyer can talk for two hours without anyone raising their voice. To Queen, Jeff, Mason, Angela, David and Robert, for what you shared and for listening. If you watch the episode, please press like and leave a comment. Sharifah says the episodes with the most conversation are the ones that get shared, and the show runs on support from people who watch it.

My own guest profile is on the show's website, where fellow guests and viewers can leave a review: theroundtabletalkshow.com/guest/rosscline

Two things I say everywhere: my correspondence and these posts are prepared with AI assistance from my own documents, and I check every fact personally; and in 2025 I publicly relied on a mistranslation of one official letter and corrected the record after written clarification. The Chinese originals govern; my translations are working translations. The other guests' words above are summarised from the live recording, not quoted, except where marked.