Court Visit

I attended a court session at Troy City Court, which is the 3rd Judicial District of NY State Courts. The public defender attorney present at court was Christopher T. Maier. I had the opportunity to go in ahead of everyone else and sit up in the jury stands where I was able to clearly see and hear everything that was going on once the court session began. I went to court on Tuesday, September 3rd, the day after Labor Day, which meant that court was closed the previous day. Due to the closure, there were an unusually high number of sixty-five cases this Tuesday morning. In the court room, there where several court officers placed at different locations around the court room. They were constantly reminding everyone to turn their cell phones off. This task seemed pretty difficult for some people to comprehend since they had to keep telling people multiple times to put their phones away. Before court started, there were so many people coming in and out of the offices on either side of the court room organizing and handing out papers to the attorneys; as well as and setting up files for the judge. Once court started, the cases were introduced by stating the name of the offenders and who they were going up against. Some cases dealt with inmates that were brought in by the officers. The cases consisted of people of all ages, race, ethnicity and gender.
The specific case that stood out the most to me was the case of a man who was charged with stalking a woman, but was also arrested over the weekend after being involved in a brawl. He was brought in with a man who, from what I could tell, was some sort of officer that was in charge of his case. While the judge was reading his offenses, the offender kept interrupting saying how everything was a lie and the woman who was accusing him of stalking wasn’t telling the truth. A couple months back a restraining order was placed on this man, yet he still didn’t obey it. He though, claimed that when he would see her