The Realities of Justice

My Observations

How I’m tryna be frfr.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m interning for the local DA’s office in my home town. To be clear, this is a state District Attorney’s office and not federal, so I don’t interact with that area of criminal justice at all, beyond occasionally hearing that the feds decided to prosecute a case or something. Also, I’m pretty much exclusively in General Session and Juvenile Court. That means that I spend most of my time at the Courthouse, in Court, and not at the office preparing for a trial or anything like that.

Before we get into the meat of the post, I’ll give you some brief context regarding these two Courts. Afterwards, I’ll move on towards my own observations and experiences.

Do keep in mind that this is only 100% true in my jurisdiction, and may be slightly different in others.

General Sessions

If you’re unfamiliar with the difference between Circuit Court and General Sessions Court, Circuit is basically what most people think of when they hear about “going to Court” as it’s where things like trials happen. Sessions Court, on the other hand, is most often described as a “Court of Convenience” or, if you’re on the prosecutorial side, it’s often referred to as a kind of triage (because you have to make fast decisions on what cases are worth sending up for Circuit and which ones can be settled in Sessions).

Sessions Court is basically the lowest Court possible, and primarily exists to take the burden off of the higher Courts, since their processes take significantly longer. Every case will go through Sessions at some point, from 1st degree murder to a speeding ticket, and most cases will not go further than this. That’s because Sessions Courts can accept a guilty plea (97 percent of federal convictions and 94 percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas)¹ but they cannot find you guilty themselves, since you have a Constitutional right to a trial by jury, and there is no jury in Sessions. This in and of itself is worthy of another post, but for the purposes of this post all you need to know is that Sessions is the beginning of all criminal cases and the end of the overwhelming majority of them.

Finally, the last stage of General Sessions is the preliminary hearing. All criminal defendants have a right to a preliminary hearing, in front of a Judge, on the issue of probable cause. However, as a practical matter this basically means nothing. Unlike higher levels of the Court, both parties can appeal from Sessions (to Circuit) if a preliminary hearing doesn’t go their way. The State can choose, in the event of an unfruitful preliminary hearing, to present the case to the Grand Jury for an indictment (in most jurisdictions, this is almost always granted). If the defendant believes some error was committed, they may also appeal it to Circuit.

Juvenile Court

Juvenile Court is more or less like a watered down version of “adult” Court, but there are a few key differences. For example, juveniles don’t plead guilty or innocent, the plead true and not true (this is more a formality than anything; people just don’t like saying kids are guilty). Incarceration is also a very rare punishment, and generally only dolled out to violent kids or those who pose a flight risk (it also requires a Detention Hearing in front of a Judge or Magistrate). Most crimes are punished by community service and or fines, or therapy if warranted.

There are, however, more things a juvenile can be charged with than an adult, despite the overall inability to doll out punishments. In “adult” Court, you have misdemeanors and felonies, but in Juvenile you have Unruly and Disorderly. Unruly charges are not strictly illegal, that is to say it would not be wrong for an adult to commit them, but it is behavior that the state seeks to prevent minors for engaging in (for example, it is considered unruly for minors to send each other nudes and thus they can end up in Court if caught). Disorderly charges are things that are illegal even for adults per statutes, and it encompasses both misdemeanors and felonies.

While I said that Juvenile Court does generally lack the ability to doll out serious punishments, there is one way around this: the Transfer order. Under certain circumstances, the State may file a Transfer on a case which leads to a Transfer hearing (in front of a Judge) to determine if the Juvenile’s case will be “transferred” over to “adult” Court. This is what happens when you read something on the news about how a juvenile is being tried as an adult; the State filed a Transfer order, won the hearing, and brought charges against them as an adult. Not everything is transferable, however. Unruly charges are obviously not transferable, and Disorderly charges are only transferable under certain circumstances. Some Disorderly charges, like homicide, are pretty much always transferable. Also, pretty much any Disorderly charge can be transferred once the juvenile reaches a certain age (generally 16 or 17) but usually this is only done if they have a long record. But you won’t be able to file a Transfer on a 12 year old accused of shoplifting with no prior record.

Observations

Procedural

This section probably isn’t terribly interesting to anyone not already involved in the legal system, or at least people who have an interest in law.

It’s kind of strange how different things can work across different jurisdictions, but you sort of expect that all things considered. But sometimes things can vary wildly even within the same jurisdiction. Sometimes things are wildly different just across County lines. Maybe it’s something as simple as having a different name for the same form/order, or the pacing, or maybe it’s something rather radical like not having probation at all in the County over.

It’s also very interesting seeing even veteran attorneys be completely lost because they’re in a different County from what they are used to. Sometimes I see attorneys who think things move too fast, others say it moves too slow. Sometimes they need help figuring out relatively mundane paperwork because it’s called something different than it is in their usual area, or because the formatting is different. I’ve even made some sentencing recommendations to veteran prosecutors because they are filling in for one of the regulars and don’t really know how we usually do things.

Trial Judges also have a pretty significant amount of leeway in their Courtroom. As in, they get away with things that I don’t really think they should. I hear a lot of “Why did Judge do that?” and there is one Judge who is starting to lose some of his mental acuity due to Parkinson’s, though it’s still more or less manageable. I wouldn’t really say that this is significant enough to be a major issue, but it does show how much power a Judge can have if they choose to wield it. These things might also be more problematic in Circuit Court, but at the same time Juries tend to be the ones adjudicating there so it isn’t as much of an issue.

The People

The attorneys and Court staff are pretty chill. As you might expect in a smallish Southern town, a lot of them are pretty Conservative. That being said, my town is sort of a liberal stronghold in the area. Even then, most of the libtardy ones are more or less alright, except for some of the women. Even then, the women are more like “hecking racism and homophobia is bad” but put up with it because it’s sort of a male dominated sphere, and maintain genuinely pleasant relations with them despite all that. That’s not to say that the more Conservative types are really /ourguys/ though, they are really not racist except for maybe one old clerk guy. They just think racist memes are funny is all, basically typical normiecons.

There is a pretty clear political divide between the District Attorney’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office though. As you might expect, the PD’s Office is pretty lib coded. A lot of them genuinely believe that literally every defendant is only there because of their conditions or something. Like, we naturally get quite a few drug cases; probably a majority of cases involve drugs in some way. But the PDs, specifically the women PDs literally always say that they are “self medicating” their mental illnesses, and they genuinely believe this. This is maybe true in some cases, but it is a huge stretch to say this in the vast majority of cases. Most drug users don’t even have a mental illness outside of their drug use, they just got hooked on drugs at a young age or something.

This is not to say that all of the criminals we get are totally beyond help, because I don’t believe this is true. I think a lot of them are probably beyond help, given the state’s ability (or rather inability) to sentence them, but there are some that can probably be saved. I think also that locally we do a fair job at accomplishing this, as we have quite a few things in place to try and help the mentally ill, drug users, etc. Of course, this is sometimes abused by defendants, but it is what it is.

The defendants themselves are really just complete wild cards. I’ve seen people literally rotting away in front of my eyes (seeping some sort of Dr. Pepper colored fluid from their leg, etc.), I’ve seen juveniles that you just KNOW are going to end up on trial for murder some day, I’ve seen homeless people, I’ve seen stockholm syndromed domestic abuse victims (like 90% of them btw), complete nutjobs, etc.

I also see probably an average of one Sovereign Citizen a week. Each case is more or less the same: there is always a charge of Driving on Revoked/Suspended License (often more charges, such as not having insurance, disorderly conduct, etc.), they always go Pro Se (represent themselves), and they are always retarded. I kind of forgot that these people even existed after like 10th grade because I stopped watching YouTube videos about them at that point. They are still as retarded as ever though. I also found out that, in the post-Covid era, Courtrooms now often record everything via Zoom, and are publicly accessible. This means that Sovereign Citizen videos are no longer restricted to police bodycam footage, and now we get to see them in the Courtroom, which is its own little treat.

Overall I am sympathetic to some of the defendants but not all of them. Probably not really even most of them, but it’s nice when you get some that you can help turn their lives around. Victims in cases are also hit or miss, except in domestic abuse cases where almost all of them are retarded.

Miscellaneous

As I alluded to earlier, Zoom plays a big role in modern Courts. Some defendants only ever appear on Zoom, especially jail cases where their presence isn’t required. Zoom is also used to communicate, to some extent, between the Courthouse, the Public Defender’s Office, the jail, etc.

Terminology seems to vary a good bit between jurisdictions, as mentioned before. Sometimes an attorney will ask for a Continuance Order or something, but we usually refer to them as a Reset Sheet. A Reset and a Continuance are the same thing; you’re just asking the Court to “reset” the case for a later date. Obviously this isn’t a major communication issue, but it causes slight hangups as people have to think for what they’re asking for. Sometimes it can be harder to communicate on more uncommon issues.

There are as many mentally ill people in Court as you would expect.

Coming from a prominent family has been quite a boon for me, as quite a few people knew me or knew of me going in, and I still regularly get recognized by people when I’m at Court.

Small town Courts are quite nice to work in. Everyone knows each other and are on good terms. Many people think this is actually not a good thing; that because their attorney is friendly with the prosecutor then they will get a harsh sentencing. Not true! I have seen many cases get off relatively scot-free, just because the ADA on the case was feeling generous, or even because he “owed one” to the defense attorney or something.

The small town Court environment is generally quite pleasant. It’s nice to not have 8 zillion homicide cases open at one time like you would in Detroit or something, but on the flipside we have 8 zillion DUI cases.

We actually have so many DUI cases that we have special prosecutor whose only job is to go around the District and prosecute exclusively DUIs.

That’s all I have for now, but I plan on making some more posts similar to this in the future.

1. Missouri v. Frye, 566 U.S. 134, 132 S. Ct. 1399, 182 L. Ed. 2d 379 (2012)