Alison Neubauer
Jrn 400
Court memo
Court is very formal. People have to be dressed nicely, be quiet, no hats, no gum and no food. When the judge walks in everyone has to stand up. He leads and nobody talks unless he speaks to them. It’s very orderly and easy to follow but the language is new. They take attendance. For a class 3 felony you get a prison sentence between 2 and 5 years, a fine up to 50,000, and a year of supervision after leaving prison. A class 3 felony is something along the lines of having enough drug with intent to deal but not too much where it’s a large distribution. If you steal a considerable about of money, over 10,000 dollars it’s a class 2 felony. The sentence for that is 3-7 years in prison, up to 25,000 dollar fine and 2 years of supervised leave. A class A misdemeanor is something like attempt theft or endangering a life and the sentence is up to one year in jail, and up to 25,00 in fines. Maybe some community service. Every day there are arraignments at 1:30 p.m. That is the person first appearance in court where they hear what could happen. The circuit clerk is the keeper of the files. If you want a case you go to them with the number. They also put the schedule up online and it’s by court room. There is a docket sheet which is just an overview of what happened. A discovery is the exchange of information between the prosecutor and the defense. The courthouse is designed so that prisoners don’t mingle with the public. One half of the building is where the holding cells are and where courthouse workers go and the other is for the public. This is because it wasn’t very safe before. To find people and cases you can look it up on the circuit courts website.
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I agree. I think following the language was pretty much the hardest part. But if you're a beat reporter, it should be like riding a bike.
ReplyDeleteP.S. If I ever have any questions about fact-checking felonies, I'm coming to your blog.
I agree with you about how formal court is. I was really shocked by the fact that wearing a hat was inappropriate, that never would have occurred to me.
ReplyDeleteCourt was definitely more formal than I was expecting. And those benches were extremely uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteYou definitely fit a lot of information in here. There is so much to keep straight for courts!
Alison,
ReplyDeletegreat summary of what we learned in court. You did a good job of both providing a sense of the environment as well as important details about different charges, etc.
I expected court to be pretty formal. I'm glad Kyle showed up in a suit. That was pretty fantastic. Anyway, court language is definitely a challenge. I think once you get passed that, it's all pretty interesting.
ReplyDeleteI was shocked to hear that the courthouse wasn't originally designed to prevent the public from mingling with the prisoners. You would think that would be one of the first considerations when contructing the building. I'm suprised it took that long for a criminal to run lose or attack a citizen to be honest.
ReplyDeleteCourt was a lot more formal than I expected. Like Jen said, I thought it was crazy that they didn't used to have tight security until someone lit an explosive in the courtroom. You would think that they would take precautions to stop something like that before it happened, not change the policy afterwards.
ReplyDeleteAlison,
ReplyDeleteThis was a really good summary! A lot of the specific details were included that we learned when we were there. Court was a lot more formal than I expected as well. I didn't think that things such as gum would be considered inappropriate.