I spent most of Monday in Superior Court, Granville County, North Carolina, in connection with a murder case I’ve been following. Perhaps it would make a good longread, I thought, or at least a feature for some magazine somewhere.
It turns out … No. There is no mystery, there is no drama, there is just a depressingly familiar tale of two young lives stupidly lived and thrown casually away. I doubt very much that the names of either of the primary actors has been spoken aloud, except in that courtroom, in months. The dead man is gone more than a year now, who killed him is well-known, and by Monday there was nothing left to do but levy the penalty and file the paperwork.
Sitting there, I found myself wondering how much Joe Citizen actually knows about our justice system.
Court began at 10:00 AM, and the first order of business was for the clerk to read-out a list of the cases on the docket (there were 91). The clerk called attendance at the same time and, if a party had failed to appear, the judge issued a bench warrant for an arrest. The cases of the dozen or so people who weren’t there for the reason that they were jailed in another jurisdiction were re-scheduled.
The idea is for everyone to be present before judgin’ begins in earnest so the court can gallop right along. Indeed, court personnel were strolling around and murmuring to each other and passing files back and forth the entire while; you had to pay close attention to know who was an actor in the case at hand, and who was just there to see why such a crowd had gathered.
Here is the thing that few people understand, I imagine: What goes on in court is, overwhelmingly, merely the ratification by the judge of deals already worked-out between the accused and the district attorney; actual television-like trials are relatively rare and, though absolutely a right, not actually welcome. They, you know, get in the way of, and slow down, the important work of dispensing justice.
Your day in court lasts about 10-minutes, if it’s a complicated matter, and is not really public at all. Yes, a passerby — me, for example — can go in and sit down, and watch and take notes, but all that happens is that the judge approves deals that have already been settled — and everybody involved will claim an ethical duty of silence. The approval of the deals is public; the working-out of justice is not. That might as well occur on Mars.
On Monday there were a handful of spousal-abuse cases, some bad checks, some theft, one murder — and a whale of a lot of drug cases; overwhelmingly, in all categories of cases, the majority of the accused were black. All but one of the defendants had a publicly appointed attorney. It has been about the same in every criminal court I’ve ever visited, too. I don’t know why that is. I don’t doubt that more white people than black people are let go with a wink and a warning, but I doubt that alone explains the disparity.
The so-called “war on drugs” has been a colossal and expensive failure; the sooner we declare victory and quit the field, the better off we’ll all be. We need to get over the Puritan impulse to punish the wicked and start treating addiction as a sickness instead of a sin.