Law

Court Room Observation

For the assignment of courtroom observation, I went to New Britain Courthouse. I had a choice of viewing civil court, or criminal court. Naturally, I thought criminal court would be more interesting, so I found the court room, 1B, and sat in the back to witness the different cases at hand.

In the courtroom, the first thing I noticed is that the judge basically acted the same way for every case. What he said was pretty much the same, and asked the same questions each time such as if the defendant knew their crime, if the defendant had ample time to discuss their situation with their lawyer, and also if the defendant understood their punishment and if they were under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time their sentence was being read to them. As usual, there were prosecutors, defendants, their clients, and also a recorder. Also in every case, two officers stood by the defendants, I guess for either protection, or just in case if the defendant got out of line.

There were two people in court that I've never seen before, one was sitting to the right of the judge, and didn't really do anything, and the other person stood up by a stand not far from the judge, and at each different case, explained details of the case and the suggested punishment by the state.

During the time I did my observation I watched about 10 cases. All of the cases I saw were different, the ranged from a speeding ticket with a hundred dollar fine, to probation updates. Some cases dealt with disorderly conduct, which was a domestic dispute between two men, and some resulted in community service. Out of all the cases observed, two were very interesting. The first one was about a man who violated his probation by two counts. He was 26 years old, and stated that he had been addicted to this drug, which was not mentioned, for over 10 years. The judge gave him drug treatment for 21 days, and if he