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Jurisprudence 2012 - Dramatis Personae
Before launching into the full-on narrative, I thought I'd sketch out some of the players. I introduced a few of them in the last article, but this will hopefully give you a better view of who we're interacting with. A reminder in case you haven't read the previous episode: all names have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent.
Judge Johnson: The judge is necessarily a kind of cypher. If she lets her personality out, she risks letting her impartiality out as well. If she does that, one side or the other calls "Mistrial!" and the whole thing is rendered useless, do it again, and black marks for her. So most of my impression of Judge Johnson was of a very proper woman in her 50s, somewhat severe, in a black robe. I would be hard-pressed to say for sure what her ancestry was, but it looked to be mixed -- I wouldn't normally mention it, but race came up several times during the trial, so I feel it's fair in this case. She had portraits of Martin Luther King Jr (not unexpected in a King County Superior Court room) and Malcom X (less expected) hanging opposite the jury box.
During the course of the trial, she didn't really say anything unless it was directly pertinent to the action in the courtroom. Occasionally there would be a glimpse of emotion behind the proper words, and the two I ever perceived were amusement and annoyance. Her face was set in a sort of permanent contemplative frown, which came from furiously taking notes while trying to maintain a neutral, indifferent, composed demeanor. I was impressed both at her control of the courtroom and her restraint in the face of provocation.
Mr. Colbert: The prosecuting attorney appeared to be in his late 20s to mid 30s -- it was hard to tell. He had close-cropped black hair, was always well-shaved, and wore rimless rectangular glasses and well-fitting if conservative blue or grey suits. He always had a white shirt and subdued tie. Although I didn't pay any attention to them, I wouldn't be surprised to find that his shoes were always recently polished. The one time we saw him out of a suit, he was wearing a sweater that immediately put me in mind of Mr. Rogers, a sort of loose-fitting but still trim powder blue affair.
In demeanor, Colbert was mostly quite professional. Almost everything he said was completely professional, and even when he was laying into witnesses later on, his tone was acceptably pleasant and unfailingly polite -- it's weird to hear someone politely suggest some of the things he was suggesting (Matt, our defendant, was not accused of delivering flowers and rainbows, after all). The "mostly" part comes from his reactions to the Elf, when he was seen to roll his eyes dramatically, hide a smile behind his hand, or other such minor gestures that the court reporter couldn't enter into the written record.
Mr. The Elf: The defense attorney is going to stretch my descriptive abilities, but here goes. Imagine a man in his 70s. He is short, completely bald, and not particularly overweight, except that someone appears to have stuffed a large pillow down the front of his shirt. His face is faintly punctuated by a sparse white beard that extends from his cheekbones into his collar, and you can almost see where the artist drew in each individual hair, like a character from the Simpsons. When he opens his mouth, there's one front tooth that commands attention, and its companions shuffle backward into his mouth, having clearly nominated the leader by taking a hasty, ragged series of steps back when the lips called for volunteers from the company. Pity the front tooth, slow on the uptake.
His voice, when he speaks, puts me in mind of Diane Rheim, whose bizarre radio career is put on display every weeknight at midnight here in Seattle. It's a slightly ragged voice, which has seen better days, but is still clear. His manner of speaking is bizarre: loud, but very slow, to the point of caricature. When he says the word "evidence," (which we hear a lot), it's three very distinct syllables, very nearly three separate words: "eh-vuh-dence." Most other multi-syllabic words receive a similar treatment. He said at one point that he's been a lawyer for 43 years, and his speaking style must be heavily influenced by that experience. His questions (the vast majority of what the jury hears from the attorneys are questions to witnesses) were convoluted to such an extent that witnesses, clever and simple alike, routinely had to ask for clarification. I was usually able to get the sense of his question, and only once or twice did I completely lose it, but then my whole job was to pay attention to what he was saying. I wasn't ever surprised when a witness would cock their head to the side, and say, "I'm sorry... I didn't... Could you rephrase the question?" They always had this quizzical, puzzled expression on their face, as if they'd been unexpectedly smacked in the face with a halibut.
The Elf's wardrobe deserves a special mention. His suits, while nicely matching, appear to be a grab-bag of out-of-date fashions. There is at least one wide-lapeled tweed number that's straight out of an episde of Laugh In. He has a rotating collection of what I can only call atrocious ties. One is a hand-painted, almost photo-realistic collage of vegetables: alternating green stalks and orange bodies of carrots and other unidentifiable root vegetables, shocking in its veracity. Another is an overlapping pattern of paisley which must have geuinely originated in the 60s, alternating blues and greens with the occasional jarring point of red and orange in a dense pattern sure to make any tripping college student stop and stare for an hour or two. There are others, but they fade into insignificance when compared to these shining examples. When reading, he'd usually install an enormous pair of glasses on his face, huge lenses magnifying his protuberant eyes ludicrously.
The Elf was comedically afraid of technology. This was something which grated on me as the trial wore on (and clearly grated on Colbert and several of my fellow jurors as well). We had evidence that was on (very low-quality) video tape. We had evidence which was AVI files on a DVD. There were CDs. Cellphone records figured hugely into the evidence. There was a handgun, although the Elf was clearly more comfortable with guns than with what he thought of as "high tech." All of these things produced an honestly baffled reaction from him, which worked to his detriment. He made self-deprecating jokes about being low-tech, but didn't follow that up with any kind of Columbo-like unmasking of his actual clever death-blow dealt based on technological evidence.
If not for the fact that he was defending a man accused of a veritable raft of nasty crimes, he would have seemed to be a complete caricature.
As long as I'm going there, I should say that both attorneys were white.
Matt, the defendant: a man in his 20s, black, with closely cropped hair, clean-shaven. We discovered early in the trial that he was actually 21 (I would have guessed he was in his late 20s initially). He wasn't unattractive, inasmuch as I'm any judge. For the majority of the trial, our view of him was as the person sitting to the Elf's left at the defendant's table. I'll save his personality for later, as it didn't become apparent to us until at least half way through. He was almost always attired in a plaid button-down shirt of some variety, and disappearingly-normal pants. Of course, he was mostly seated, so I didn't get much opportunity to see his lower half.
His manner during the trial was almost scholarly. He was constantly taking notes, occasionally passing one to the Elf. He was very engaged in the whole process, as he was to prove later. This was no constantly-confused and -surprised Larry, as from my previous trial. Matt was clearly intelligent and on top of things.
The Courtroom: In TV dramas, the courtroom is almost universally this kind of majestic wood-paneled chamber, dark and forbidding, with the judge elevated high above everyone else, pounding a gavel and shouting for order. Our courtroom was considerably more mundane. The back wall, which the judge sat in front of, is indeed wood-paneled, but it was a light-toned wood, with odd green stripes between panels. The remaining three walls are white. When you walk in the door, the first thing you face is the audience seats, a set of almost ecclesiastical-looking pews facing the judge. Turn to your right, and you're facing the jury box against the right-hand wall. The defense table is parallel to the bar, facing the judge, and the prosecutor's table is beyond it to the left, perpendicular to the bar, so that the prosecutor sits facing the jury. Both tables are heavily built, but have a certain cheapness to them that seems a bit out of place.
The bar separates the court staff from everyone else -- it's almost literally a bar in the normal, drinking-establishment sense of the word. It's a horizontal wooden surface, about a foot deep, and the width of the judge's box. In our case, it was broken by a couple of microphones and a triangular speakerphone. Behind the bar, from left to right, are the bailiff, the court clerk, and the court reporter. Behind these three, and slightly elevated, are the judge, and the witness stand.
It struck me (as these things do) that the setup was actually defensive: an aggravated defendant bent on getting to the judge or witness would have to come over or around his table, and climb over the bar or detour around it. Either direction, there's someone in the way, and the two King County Jail officers sitting heavily by the door would doubtless spring into rapid action in such an event. The obvious exit is past the officers. It happens there's also an exit through the judge's chambers behind the courtroom, but it took me weeks to realize that. There are prominent cameras on massive, welded supports on three of the four walls. The cameras point at the judge, the audience and defendant's table, and the plaintiff's table. I finally spotted one which might have covered the jury, an unobtrusive smoked dome of plastic in the ceiling over the audience. I found myself wondering who was watching 6 cameras in each courtroom, or if they were only for recording the action.
The Bailiff: the bailiff deserves special mention. This is the only court staff the jury ever interacts with. If not for her, you might suspect the entire court is composed of cold, uncaring people -- not that they are, but the rules of conduct say that the jury can't interact with pretty much anyone involved in the trial, in order to avoid an appearance of bias. Our bailiff was pleasant, and clearly a warm, caring person. She was occasionally oddly constrained in her answers to questions, although it was only odd when you didn't think of it from a judicial perspective: there are some questions she has to bring to the judge for legal reasons, and on these, she'd immediately clam up. We got used to her, and when she had to leave the court for a week mid-trial, it was almost jarring to deal with the temporary bailiffs who came in to cover for her.
The Court Staff: As I said before, we basically had no interactions with the court staff, but we spent a lot of time sitting in that jury box, and some of that was dead time, while one of the attorneys was checking his notes (almost always the Elf), or preparing some exhibit. During that dead time, I'd find my eye wandering to check out the other people in the courtroom. To properly imagine the court reporter, you have to imagine a man with shoulder-length white hair, a drooping mustache, and the thing which is clearly missing from the scene: a saxophone. I only realized it as I was thinking over his description for this article, but he clearly needed to be playing a saxophone in a smoky nightclub. The only words I ever heard him speak were on perhaps three occasions when he said he couldn't hear someone. His face had a sort of dead appearance when he was recording, and now I can perfectly picture it coming alive as he peals sweet licks from his tenor sax.
To picture the clerk, you need only imagine a poorly cast American remake of a fine foreign fantasty film. He is the rogueish ex-thief, or wizard, who has too much of a Western star in him to make a good fantasy character, but far too much fantasy to ever actually star in a Western except as an incidental character who goes down in a shootout two minutes after being introduced. He has long salt-and-pepper (mostly salt) hair tied back in a ponytail, and a similar beard with a pronounced mustache, framing a squarish smiling face. I saw several other people with similar tonsorial choices, and found myself wondering if it was some kind of fad at the courthouse to have court staff who had long white hair and facial hair.
With that, I think you've had enough teasing. Coming up next, we hear opening arguments and launch into testimony.
Posted at 12:24 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater