"...[I]f I get a sufficient number of Judges to subscribe to the affidavit, I shall then deliver it to the Judge who is actually conducting your trial. Possibly I may have secured his signature too, then everything will be settled fairly soon, a little sooner than usual...[H]e can grant an acquittal with an easy mind, and though some formalities will remain to he settled, he will undoubtedly grant the acquittal to please me and his other friends. Then you can walk out of the Court a free man.
"So then I'm free," said K. doubtfully.
"Yes," said the painter, "but only ostensibly free, or more exactly, provisionally free...That is to say, when you are acquitted in this fashion the charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, but it continues to hover above you and can, as soon as an order comes from on high, be laid upon you again...
"The documents remain as they were, except that the affidavit is added to them and a record of the acquittal and the grounds for granting it. The whole dossier continues to circulate, as the regular official routine demands, passing on to the higher Courts, being referred to the lower ones again, and thus swinging backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscillations, longer or shorter delays.
"These peregrinations are incalculable. A detached observer might sometimes fancy that the whole case had been forgotten, the documents lost, and the acquittal made absolute. No one really acquainted with the Court could think such a thing. No document is ever lost, the Court never forgets anything. One day -- quite unexpectedly -- some Judge will take up the documents and look at them attentively, recognize that in this case the charge is still valid, and order an immediate arrest.
"I have been speaking on the assumption that a long time elapses between the ostensible acquittal and the new arrest; that is possible and I have known of such cases, but it is just as possible for the acquitted man to go straight home from the Court and find officers already waiting to arrest him again. Then, of course, all his freedom is at an end."
-- Franz Kafka, The Trial