Well, I went to court. and so did this gentleman. He wasn't given bail, surprise surprise. The courtroom was full of kids, 17 or 18 yrs old, most of them, and every now and then one of them would break into tears. Also there were the mother of the victim, who was dry-eyed but very tired looking, and the mother of the accused, who sat in the same row as me... I took tons of notes, lots of other things went on too, and I'm hoping to get some sense out of what I wrote down. A woman got a week in jail for shoplifting 6.99 worth of cosmetics. Another woman had a bench warrant issued for her, but it turned out that she had just gotten the wrong courtroom, and when she did show up, her lawyer said, "She's here now, so we can throw out the warrant." In some ways it was more formal than I thought it would be, there were a lot of requests to adjourn things to later dates, but in some ways it was less formal. The accused people sat in among all the grieving kids, and the judge was actually very sweet to some of them. One guy with a 'failure to provide a sample of breath' charge was also up on possession of marijuana, and the judge said to him, at one point, quite mildly, "Four ounces is rather a lot of marijuana..." Another guy with an impaired charge told the judge he was taking welding at the college, and the judge said, as if they'd just been introduced socially, "Welding is a good career choice. I wish you the best in that."

Another young man was up on armed robbery charges (stole cigarettes and phone cards by brandishing a syringe full of blood at the cashier) and when the judge was sentencing him, he said, "Many thousands of people go out every day to their minimum wage jobs standing behind counters in stores, and we have a duty to protect them from people who come with guns or syringes..." Guy's lawyer wanted a conditional sentence, but he got jail. An interesting morning, all in all.