In God We Trust

“In God We Trust”, when I enter the first room we went in criminal court, I saw this words. In the room, it was a little bit different from my imagination of the criminal court. There are many people, and it looked a little bit messy. I thought the court was more strict and serious. In the first room, the criminal of the weight of guilt was supposed to be light (not murder or some heavy accident), however, the process of judgement was so casual for me. Some police ate snacks and some officer had a small talk and talked on the phone in amusement. It took under five minuts to talk about per accident, and It looked very automatically for me. I felt the gap between the mood in the room and the word “In God We Trust”. A person of interest and a agent seemed that they did not talk to each other enough in some case. In whole, all process looked just a assembly-line operation like a office functions. In one of the case that a woman who seemed a homeless left her children, I was a little bit shocked that she was in handcuffs. However, all crime suspects looked that they had no voice, and their agent, prosecutor and polices spoke about the event.
In the second room, it was a exactly court I thought. There are judge, jury, witness, lawyer,,,however there were no word “In God We Trust”. I guess this mean that jury( citizen, people) should have justice by themselves and judge the event? Anyway, the criminal lawsuit in this room was more serious than the first room’s one. The mood of this room was filled with a feeling of tension. When we entered into the room, the lawyer was examining the witness, and every body looked very nervous and tried to concentrate the process of it. In Japan, we started to have jury system from last year, 2009, so the jury system did not hit me in my mind. The lawyer was asking to the witness on detail of time, date, action and these discrimination.
This criminal court tour was very good experience for me, and this is the first time to go to court in my life even if I studied law in Japan. However, I felt scary that people judge people even if they are professional or citizen as jury.