So, you fought the law. Congratulations on your… whatever: Principle. Greed. Opportunism. Desperation. Victim-of-circumstances-hood. Bigotry. Stupidity. Whatever.
What happens afterward? It mostly depends on what kind of law you fought, and how.
If you were civilly disobedient to an unjust law, maybe your jailhouse letter will become a literary classic. (Or, at least, a literary classic to those who agree that the law was unjust.1) If, that is, it's written well enough, and timely enough, and you've got a good enough platform.
If you lied to the cops — the right kind of cops, in the right way — you'll probably get pardoned. Otherwise, you're screwed; you'll be stuck working for a living.
If you committed small thefts three times, including two economy-sized bags of diapers on the third attempt, you won't have another chance for a quarter of a century (or more). But that's not cruel (or unusual) at all. Meanwhile, if you merely steal millions, you'll get less than half of that (and end up with a lot of supporters at the Business Roundtable, almost all of whom deny that their sympathy is related to "there but for a better document-destruction policy go I").
If you deny the laws of nature, though, there's little chance of a pardon. There is, instead, only pure chance. You might survive; you might not. Standing up against laws of nature — even, and perhaps especially, "laws of nature" with which you disagree, or of which you are ignorant — is not a matter of principle for which you can be pardoned. It's a matter of ignorance and stupidity for which your reward will be daisies overhead.
Extending this from "vaccine denial"2 to "climate-change denial," "evolution denial," "globe denial," and related fights against laws of nature by those who would impose their ideological predispositions and self-aggrandizement not on pieces of nature but on Nature is left as an exercise for the student. A profoundly upsetting, frustrating, and futile exercise, but required to get course credit. I only had to change one word in the following, and it's worth figuring out the source, the "actual" objectionable thing, and the consequences of not doing that objectionable thing.
You know when vaccination first began, Mandrake?
No, no. I don't, Jack.
Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Because one of nature's dirty little secrets — and economic doctrine is just a special case of it — is that you can't get something for nothing. Not even if you're Rap-Master Ronnie (or someone who would hold him up for worship). And it's always worth asking "cui bono?" — and how.
- The irony that this piece is public domain because, thanks to "unjust" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1909 (and then-dominant-in-the-US Universal Copyright Convention) that operated to transfer property interests from the have-nots to the haves, and prevented the have-nots from maintaining their property against negligence by the haves due to technical failures, is for another time.
- Which is not at all the same thing as demanding adequate testing… under the conditions actually obtaining and with the knowledge already acquired. The key, though, is that what testing is "adequate" depends… on the consequences, on who is doing it, on what level of confidence in results is required, on preexisting knowledge, on analogy to other well-tested circumstances. "Antiviral vaccines" in 2020 are not "thalidomide" in 1954.