Madhavi Rampersaud
Monday’s trip to the Manhattan Criminal Court was my first trip to a courthouse. I was definitely excited to visit and learn something new. When I went inside the building for the first few cases, I was honestly disappointed. I didn’t expect the cases to be so boring and disorganized. I was observing everyone in the room and they seemed to be all over the place. For example, I noticed that a lot of secretaries (I am assuming they were secretaries) had a lot of paperwork to look over and process. There were times when the judge or lawyer ( I think) weren’t sure where certain documents were. There were unexpected breaks during the evaluation and a lot of people were distracted. I literally saw a man on Facebook which I just thought was sad since he was supposed to be working.
When we moved on to the bigger case in the bigger court room, I was more excited. The courtroom resembled the way I expected an actual courtroom to look like. The jury was set against the wall and everything was basically in place the way it should be. The case that we were observing was definitely interesting. I was focused on it throughout the entire time were there. The defendant was being interrogated by this woman who continued to ask him questions about what he did during the night of so and so. It was definitely interesting. I don’t think it’s necessary to discuss the details of this case since it is private but it was insightful and I learned a few things from watching it. Eventually the judge called a recess and we left. Overall this experience was a very good one. I definitely recommend it to other future english classes that focus on race/ justice.
