Miscellaneous

Our firm represents a number of City’s and is responsible for prosecuting traffic violations and other violations of each City’s Code of Oridinances. So, I spend plenty of time in magistrate court. Today, I was there for over three hours and presented my one case in a matter of about 10 minutes. The rest of the time I watched the show.

Usually, each case takes 15 minutes or less with the City or County Attorney presenting the testimony of the officer and the defendant making a statement. With a lot of the cases, the defendants don’t even show. But, there are times when people are there to duke it out. Today was one of those days. It was exceptional entertainment and I even stuck around for a while after I was done to watch how it continued.

One case (a simple assault bench trial) had an attorney on the defense side and began aroun 9:20 this morning. They had a break around 11:15 to try to get a witness there. The first two hours was full of objections, a couple of admonishments from the magistrate to the defense attorney for being rude and argumentative. One time the defense attorney told the magistrate he hoped that she wasn’t trying to be the prosecutor in the case. All sorts of fun stuff.

They started again around 12:00. In the 45 minute break, I thnk the State had three more trials, and two cities had one trial each. I got done around noon and decided to stick around for a while to see if the tenor had changed. It was much quieter, but there were still numerous objections (does it matter in a bench trial?).

I didn’t stay until the end, but I’ll be checking ICIS later this week to find out the result. It was interesting stuff.

Another trial involved a woman who got a citation for running a red light. Her defense was basically a question: “Why did it take the officer so long to pull her over after she ran the red light?” It always amazes me that defendants will go into court and admit that they did the thing they were cited for, then tell a story about why they shouldn’t be found guilty. For instance, this young lady said, “I can see by the video that I did run the red light, but why did it take so long for the officer to activate his lights and pull me over? Why did you have to wait until I was at work to do that?”

I find watching other people try cases is vastly educational for me. Even in magistrate court. Whether or not I think they did a good job, I have never come away thinking, “I would have done the exact same thing.” I think that’s good. And I often try to remember if I was as ignorant about the duties of a judge or magistrate before I went to law school as many people seem to be. I don’t recall it, though I probably was.