Court Observation: An Encounter with the Judiciary

An Encounter with the Judiciary.
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An Encounter with the judiciary.
It was on a Tuesday morning and the situation on this day is that courts are usually congested. I arrived in the court compound at around 10.00 am, and all the parking slots had already been filled up. Just as I was about to leave, I noticed a group of people coming out of one of the courtrooms so I knew that the proceedings for one of the cases had successfully concluded and I would get a parking slot. Therefore, I secured a parking slot and rushed to one of the courtrooms that I had been before.
I settled on an empty bench whereby the public was allowed to sit in order to follow the proceedings, and a new case was just commencing. In this case, a man who had a grey suit was the accused. His case was read. He was being accused of trespass to a restricted building in New Jersey, and the authorities arrested him. The court found out that he had a previous criminal record in Massachusetts in an unrelated case. Asked whether he admitted the accusations or not, the man who only spoke Spanish pleaded guilty through his interpreter but requested for a chance to narrate his side of the story. He was allowed to talk, and the whole court was silent to listen to him. He claimed although he had entered the building illegally, he had no ill intention and that he had problems reading English notices so he could not realize that the building was restricted. Through his lawyer, he went on to request for leniency as he tried to catch up with the language of the country. The judge rejected his request and read his sentence to be a one-month imprisonment, so he was escorted by police to their custody after having signed an agreement with his lawyer. Considering the fact that the man was not conversant with the English language, justice was never served. In my view, entering a building that is restricted, with the notice written in English should not send a man who cannot read and interpret the notice to prison.
The judge signaled for the next case, and the suspect was ushered in. It was an African American with an orange prison suit. He was accused of fighting on the street and attempt of assault to police officers as he had tried to attack the police with a weapon to prevent arrest. He pleaded guilty. When asked to say anything in his defense, he claimed that he was the breadwinner to a family with three children who would suffer if he was imprisoned. The judge, however, rejected his request on the grounds that he was a threat to security in the society by the fact that he had sustained a bullet wound in a previous incident. The Judge also rejected his request for the trial date extension on medical grounds. Although the judge served justice in impriso...