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court observation

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Court Observation
October 30, 2012

On September 27th I went to Branch 6 to watch the criminal trial of the defendant Lord Wilson. It was making out to be a weeklong trial and I made it on the second to last day. All I knew was that it was a case involving drugs and had been in the making for a while. When I arrived at the public safety building to listen to the criminal trial taking place I learned firsthand that things never seem to stay on schedule. A recess was taking place when I walked in. While I was sitting there I overheard another person in the courthouse talking about how they heard testimonies from witnesses the day before. That’s what I was looking forward to and now I was worried that I wouldn’t get to observe anything …show more content…

The defense argued “hearsay”. Some of the people in the voice recordings haven’t even testified and haven’t been confronted in court about the recordings. The defense believed that was reason enough to not have it allowed. Unfortunately for the defense the judge ruled that the witness could testify and that her job of supervising the telephone calls was all the ‘training’ she needed to be a reliable witness.
While I sat there and watched the defense and prosecution argue back and forth about what information should be introduced I realized that it wasn’t exactly like the TV shows I loved to watch. It was so much slower and not as easy to follow. In real life you have the defense and prosecution switching off saying statute numbers to help argue their points and you soon get lost in it all; it’s not easy to understand. There were certain points during the trial that I felt like I didn’t even know what was being said. It definitely felt like the people involved in the criminal trial were speaking a different language to one another and the people watching/observing were just left sitting there confused.
Just as I thought things were about to pick up with the judge allowing the witness to testify the prosecution had yet another piece of information they wanted to introduce. I always thought that the prosecution and the defense had to introduce all their ‘evidence’ or witnesses in the first day or so. I

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