log 11

May 30, 2002

This morning the court was running very behind. Actually, it wasn’t so much the court, but the police station that was late. Arraignments cannot take place until we receive the cases from the police department. I stood in the courtroom for awhile, talking to the MOL court officer of the day. It seems like a different one comes every other day.

The arraignments didn’t last too long. There was only one woman in jail, and she was pretty much sentenced to go right back. “Forthwith.” What a great word. Anyway, after the initial arraignments, I snooped around the clerks a little looking for something to do. Monica caught on quickly and gave me some pending cases to file. This was a new task for me, involving a new drawer and filing alphabetically. Obviously it wasn’t hard, but nevertheless, I learned something.

I wandered back into the courtroom, just in time to discover more arraignments of people with lawyers. After two or three of those (for which I ran paperwork to the clerks and back), there was a preliminary hearing, something I’d not seen thus far. It seems to work pretty much like a bench trial, except the judge does not have to make a finding. He simply decides whether or not there is probably cause for the case to continue, and sends it off to the Grand Jury for the County. The defense attorney was treating it like a trial though, and while he did present an argument that would lessen her sentence, it was practically agreeing with the prosecutor that the girl did, in fact, steal. Interesting.

Because Thursdays are always slow court days, I came back after lunch for the sole purpose of filing. My first task was taking all of the Kevin A. Davis files that Carrie and I had pulled from the basement and re-filing them in the basement. Luckily I had separated them into traffic and criminal and put them in order. Filing them didn’t take even half the time it took to pull them. Then I returned upstairs, and proceeded to take Lori B.’s old cases. I separated them into traffic and criminal, then organized the traffic cases. Pete came to me with another request, which I quickly sent off, as the man had no record at the Court. Then I went downstairs once again to file the traffic cases. I re-emerged, sorted the criminal cases, went back downstairs, and filed the criminal cases.

When I was finished, Lori let me look at an old murder case from the 60’s. As I was reading through it, I got extremely confused as to who killed who, because they kept repeating a name, sometimes with Howard Thomas [last name] aka Howard [last name], sometimes Howard Thomas [last name] aka Thomas [last name]. It took me a moment to realize that one was Jr. and one was III. In other words, this guy killed his father… and his mother. Sickos.

8:15am – 12:00pm 1:30pm – 3:45pm 6 hours