Background noise

I went to court today to be a witness in a stalking case. It was a very surreal hour and a half.

The case was to be heard by a district magistrate, and when I walked into the nondescript building on the side of a nondescript road, I walked into a nondescript room buzzing with people from all walks of life.

I don't know much about the operations of the justice system, but throughout the hour I sat there, I came to realize that all cases heard in this tiny courtroom were criminal. There was the mother-daughter team caught stealing from a department store, a guy accused of harassment who had to turn over a computer card filled with photos, a woman who sat waiting for her friend to get out on bail, and plenty of lawyers wheeling suitcases, meeting their clients for the first time.

Oh, and the place was littered with police officers, security guards, constables, troopers.

It took me a while to get over the feeling that I had been dropped there from outer space. And once I almost got over it, a door opened, and a man in shackles came out and passed through the room very close to me. And later another. Then another. And another.

I thought of "Silence of the Lambs," when Jodie Foster's character goes down the row of cells and is leered at and spit on. Only.... there were no bars between me and these guys. And it's not often that I'm the most attractive girl in the room. Not often at all.

And then one of the guys who was previously shackled came out and sat down, sans chains and handcuffs. OK, someone thought that was a good idea, but couldn't they let him go out the back door??

I spent only a little time in the actual courtroom, and during the few cases I heard, I knew I liked this judge. She was very much like Judge Judy, and the whole scene was quite entertaining. The law enforcement in the room was goofing around when she was on the bench ruling, but at one point she left the room and while the law enforcement guys kept goofing off, telling stories, I heard her holler from another room, "That's a courtroom, fellas, not a dinner theater!!"

One officer was telling a story about being hit by "some mother fucker" at a DUI checkpoint, got smacked off the windshield, and while he was lying on the pavement, a fellow officer came over and said, "You better hurry up and go get that guy."

After all I witnessed in the 90 minutes I was trapped in that building, I am surprised at the compassion they showed me. It would seem to me that people in that business would be hardened and jaded, but I thought just the opposite after today.

They seem to understand human nature better than most of us.