Courtroom Observation

I keep saying that I’m going to write about going to court reporting school and I keep proving myself a liar.  The reason is simple: I don’t know how to make it interesting.  I find I need to have the machine on hand to explain how the keyboard works but peoples’ eyes tend to glaze over after more than two minutes.  To enthrall anybody over a blog post seems a hopeless quest.

Earlier this week, I finally did something worth mentioning.  One part in my advancement is courtroom observation, meaning I got to take time off of school to visit our county courthouse and see how it worked.  I had to do five hours a couple months back before I could move onto writing in the 120s class (that’s 120 WPM that I’m now working on achieving now.)

Once I got to my 120s, I was informed that I needed to do an extra five hours of courtroom observation before I could move into my 160s or 180s.  I’m not sure, but basically, I had plenty of time to get that done—I haven’t passed one 120 test yet.

Over the weekend, though, I went to visit my family for my sister’s wedding and I didn’t want to go back to school, so to stay home an extra day, I decided to do my courtroom observation right then.

What made this interesting was that I ended up going to the trial of my dad’s former boss, who is charged with fraud.

While I’m not going to go into detail about the trial itself (I already wrote a three-page essay on it, which was two more than I was required to do—yes, I’m an overachiever) there were a couple observations that I found absolutely fascinating.

First of all, the jury is not present for all of the proceedings.  Before they’re let in the courtroom and after they’ve been excused for their recesses, the lawyers and judges cover a lot of business, and that’s when it gets ugly.  I know in movies, the lawyers tend to do a lot of the grandstanding and arguments before the jury but that was not what I saw.  The lawyers were very well behaved in front of the jury and holding in their tempers.  Once the jury wasn’t in the room, though, the boxing gloves came off and they went for blood.

That judge was such an even-tempered man and very calm and deliberate.  He spoke slowly enough that I feel I probably could have written over ninety percent of what he said (and that was cool) although I know I would have fallen behind quick with the other lawyers and witnesses.  The point is, he needed that serenity because those attorneys kept fighting over the same issue all day long—namely, the admittance of certain exhibits, and specifically certain e-mail chains on the grounds of relevance and hearsay.  They gnawed on that like a pair of dogs over a favorite bone.  The defense generally got his way and the exhibits were allowed, although on the one case where his exhibit was not allowed because the judge deemed it to be hearsay, the lawyer threw a hissy fit for five minutes.

Let me tell you, the jury missed out on a lot of good stuff.  There was nothing else half as entertaining the rest of the day, unless you count the witness who couldn’t remember anything about the events asked of her.

Trials are very long and tedious affairs, and a case like this covers many months’ worth of evidence and facts.  I should know; it’s been at least five years since the fraud came to light.  I won’t find out until next week how the jury decides the case.  We’ll see how it goes.