"The Courthouse Hallway: The Lawyer Explains 'The DEAL' To His Client"

This is the scene every weekday in courthouses across America;

hallways filled with litigants, witnesses, jurors, lawyers and law

enforcement personnel. Here the attorney explains 'the deal' to his

client. Settlement in civil cases or a negotiated plea in criminal

ones, not trial, is the rule of thumb for 90% of cases, large and

small, and especially smaller ones. Your ratings, critiques and

observations are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly, very

critically or wish to make a remark; please submit a helpful and

constructive comment; please share your photographic knowledge to help

improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

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This is an essay, it's long, and if you just want to look at photos, you may not want to read this or wait until another time.

john

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Not every courthouse is constructed with marble or other, expensive, polished stone hallways, but many are.  Some are constructed of highest-cost polished hardwoods, including ceilings and walls -- especially federal (US) courtrooms.

One reason, but only one, is that such courthouses are intended to last as long as the nation and must be constructed to last.

The purpose of courts, as I learned in law school decades ago and later in practice (ending well over two decades ago) is partly to 'do justice' and about as much to dispose of disputes, even if some are disposed of wrongly (against all loftily stated goals of the United States justice system and against most people's popular beliefs, at least in the US). 

Those who want trials seldom 'get justice', as in criminal cases conviction rates are absurdly high for cases that are decided by juries, and judges often 'punish' those who demand trials in criminal cases where it it possible for demanding a trial, (not always but more generally) and are generally more lenient on those who 'plead out' to lesser charges or just are given 'lesser 'time' for pleading guilty where it's judge's discetion.

(Note: I cannot say with certainty whether the litigant above is a civil or criminal litigant, and do not speculate anything about that individual, nor should anyone who comments.)

If every civil and criminal litigant demanded their rightful trial, the wheels of justice would instantly grind to a halt; accommodations have to be made, as any regular viewer of television's 'Law and Order' series could tell you.

Civil litigants with small cases almost never have real trials except in small claims court where everybody gets one if their cases does not settle, and many do not because there are no lawyers - they're the oil that lubricates the sticky cogs of the wheels of justice.

Mostly those who get trials are criminal defendants who can only do better with a trial because for instance the prosecutor believes he/she has an air tight case and won't cut a deal, or there is mandatory sentending and judges and prosecutors have no discretion to consider bargains, so their time gets tied up in MORE trials rather than fewer, though increasing numbers of the guilty are pleading guilty when faced with such intransigence.

Civil cases must constitutionally take a back seat to criminal trials which come first; and civil litigants often must wait forever to get a courtroom, then pay for a jury to hear their case, and if the jury is not paid daily, the jury is dismissed, the judge hears and decides the case without a jury (which is dismissed if not paid), and most judges have 'heard it all numerous times' and are bored to tears of hearing the same, tired stories, even if they mean well and are conscientious.

Some courthouses in rural areas are held in backrooms or in special rooms in post offices -- that is common -- or in other buildings, especially municipal buildings. 

Some courts are even held in 'so-called 'mobile' courthouses or even school rooms.

If there's a judge and court clerk in a room and it's 'in session' it's a courtroom, no matter how good or bad the construction is.

Marble and high quality woods are expensive and designed to impress litigants with the gravitas of the institution of the COURT and what it stands for . . . . which now is what I've explained above -- something a little less than what many Americans were led in the '50s when I grew up to believe that's what comprised justice in America.

Nowadays, with complex life and laws, codes, rules and regulations (with force of law) for everything and almost everybody daily breaking some kind of law, often without knowing it, almost anybody in the US can be accused rightfully of breaking some sort of law. 

It's almost impossible not to -- there are just so many laws, however well meaning.

Doubt that? 

Let your child try to sell lsome lemonade out front of your US house and see if the child gets into legal trouble for no sanitation permits, vending permits, or business licenses or violating zoning ordinances (all legal violations that are usually crimes). Such cases happen every summer across America with regularity.

Hopefully good sense prosecutors will understand their duty is not to prosecute every technical violation of every law -- as almost every citizen would be jail material, but to dispose of many real disputes civilly and criminally to punish the wrongdoers who have done and pose real risk of future harm to society.

That being said, the US still has a pretty good court system compared to most of the world.

Assembly line justice and all.

Just don't think you're going to 'go to trial and all the way to the Supreme Court' when your neighbor's fence encroaches on your driveway.

john

John (Crosley)

Well, if you were caught taking pictures in a courthouse I expect your public defender would be explaing "the deal" to you.

Meir, you're partly right.

If this were a US federal courthouse, almost universally (maybe universally still) photographs traditionally have been forbidden and photographers fined or imprisoned after being found in contempt (you don't always get a trial with contempt charges depending on whether the judge saw you, and depending on the punishment).

But this is NOT a US federal courthouse, but notice I did not say where it was taken on purpose.

With regard to photography in courthouses, which I practice ultra-rarely (once or twice) my rule is "don't ask, and don't wait to be told", sort of similar to Clinton's policy 'Don't ask, don't tell' on Gays in the military.

I don't ask if I can take photographs, and if no one cautions me and I'm clandestine, I might take a telling photo or two, and as a non-lawyer (I resigned two decades or so ago), I'm not, as lawyers are, charged with already knowing all court rules. 

Lawyers in practice have it tougher -- they're presumed to KNOW the rules and in fact are charged with knowing them -- it's the price of calling yourself a lawyer, and each court and courthouse and sometime each security staff or each judge (or each trial or each courtroom) may have its own policy on cameras in courtrooms or hallways.

If you enter through the metal detectors (now almost universal) at court entrances, you may be cautioned at one entrance and not at another.  The point is NOT to get cautioned at all, for in some courthouses cameras are welcome and even used during trials. 

How am I to know which ones forbid photography, unless someone takes it on themselves to tell me - someone official?

So, in between waiting for documents to be signed by a Chief Judge in a private matter, I waited, saw this, photographed it, and only took one shot. 

I was satisfied with the result with being emblematic of the entire courthouse experience.

Imagine -- with my experience, -- my delight in seeing and taking JUST ONE photograph, that tells so much of the story exprience most every lawyer and litigant/court participant in America would recognize and all lawyers would  readily understand.

It's a life I once lead, before I discarded my power suits and power shoes. (no wing tips though).

Frankly, I seldom set foot in court, even then; courthouses were mostly foreign to me.

I was a litigator, long ago.  In fiction, that means 'trial lawyer'.

If you think I am a lengthy writer here, my letters to insurance companies and their lawyers were legendary for their length AND their veracity.

The companies and other defendants with means would spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to investigate and examine every charge I made in elaborate correspondence, but EVERY fact made in that correspondence was taken from written records, so there was almost NO chance of a mistake, and thus no reason, they eventually realized, of taking cases with me to trial or even to fight very strongly or loudly.

My cases settled after I wrote my letters and defendants evaluated them carefully.

I got complaints galore about my long letters, from the recipients -- too long, too detailed, too explanatory, too costly to have their attorneys read them.

Mainly too costly at $400 to $600 an hour to have attorneys read them.  Bills to read my 50-page letters from their attorneys then check all the facts, were enormous.

Those cases settled.

The reason:  I had an very good reputation for telling the truth in those letters, verifying facts from written sources that I usually enclosed, and then if attacked, I had all data worked up on word processor and could churn out subsequent documents with almost no effort, right up to trial briefs with only minimal rewriting, while defense attorneys would spend tens and more thousands of dollars coming to the same conclusions I told them they would come to in my initial letters.

Their employers, the companies, soon figureed it out; I had very little to do with attorneys, as it was uneconomical for them to hire attorneys -- they just had to read what I wrote them and look at my documentation.

Also, they knew I could store things in near final form on word processor, rewrite it for any occasion right up to appeal brief with almost little added effort.

I did my work 'up front', and seldom if ever had surprises.  I worked HARD!

It made my clients (not all, but most) happy, at least those who understood what I did, though I did it in my office often till midnight or 4:00 a.m. in my home office.

I was all work and no play and a very dull boy, at least on the outside.

I'm making up for that now.

(oh,and creative but factual legal writing can be very interesting and not boring at all - no boiler plate - every word I wrote was original, just like here.)

And I wrote then as now, FAST!

It's been almost 25 years, but I could walk over and replace this attorney I feel easily, as though nothing changed, just by reviewing court rules for changes and refreshing my knowledge of statutes.

I am qualified to teach certain legal subjects in law school as a professor, but as an older guy who loves to take photos, why bother?  And who hires older guys?

Photography has my heart, just as law did in the earlier years.

(My unorthodox but winning style won cases by letter, that few other attorneys in the world would ever think could be brought, yet I recognized there were good cases that sometimes were rejected by every other lawyer in town  -- and I still have that ability to 'snoop out' hidden recoveries that few attorneys -- including the most skillful --l would know or suspect would bring recoveries.

In fact, those attorneys often are the first to throw away the best, easiest cases, for failure to recognize the case recovery potential, because the case is 'out of the ordinary', and the attorneys do not think 'in depth' but work from practice and rote. 

I worked from inspiration, which I found in my two personal law libraries, picking apart laws and regulations word by word, punctuaiton mark by punctuation mark, and often found surprising results that sometimes seemed to stand reason on its head, but often turned 'sure losers' into cases that paid the five mortgages.

Maybe that's also worked its way into my photography and why my photos seem so different from anybody else's.

No one from any court system will bother me for taking this true-to-life photo - official or non officially - for I broke no known rules.

(U.S. federal court is entirely different, extremely rigid, and woe betide those who go against federal authority - including the usual 'no photos' rule inside federal court houses.)

Thanks for looking out for me.

john

John (Crosley)

I am either right :-) or I am wrong :-(. There is no such thing as "partly right" because "partly right" is "partly wrong" which is "wrong" -unless we are talking about "little white lies".

If this applies to a federal court house in general, you might be right, or correct.

If this applies to many other courthouses which either do not inform me about their photography policy, do not have a coherent one, or just do not enforce one, then you are wrong.

But as a blanket statement, it is neither wrong or right, it is 'partly right' or in your contortion, 'partly wrong'.

Or put another way, under some underlying conditions, what you said might be true; under others, it might be completely false.

It's just a matter of rather petty semantics if you read the great care with which I went to above to explain the differences, which I presume you did not.

Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have written what you did, unless you just wanted attention.

john

John (Crosley)

When I am wrong so be it; it does happen. But here I am not and I simply meant to point out that in this one you crossed the line which irks me; and to get your opinion (which I did) and the rest is humor -not trying to make your enemy.

If you search you will surely find state/city statues against this and your "don't ask don't tell" (ignorance of the law) is not a defense -you know that. A courthouse is not the street. A man has legal and ethical right to privacy -not to be recorded by some outsider guy walking around with a camera  and especially then post it on the internet.

(By the way in New Brunswick, N.J. it was illegal -after 9/11- to even take a photograph of the Middlesex County Courthouse from the street. I learned that all on my own.)

In other public places there are also rules.  Personally for me, not to request permission in public places -let's say a restaurant- is a judgement call. It is probably against the rules but is this photo unethical; does it compromise an individual or the establishment; is someone apt to be offended; and how much trouble am I into if I get caught.

As for "public defender" etc in my comment, well that was meant to inject humor by using "the deal" as you used in the title. The outcome might not be so severe.

I say finally. I wrote: "if you were caught....I expect". It is a hypothesis. Trouble is sure to find you is truly my expectation and my expectation is not "wrong" until you get caught and inform me that the outcome was otherwise -and even then I'll just think that this one time you got lucky.

Next time you do this turn on your flash and let's see what happens :-)

With regards

If you're going to do humor, in the middle of your serious comments, please put a smiley face, the words, 'wink, wink, nudge, nudge' or something else which you can think of to let me know you've switched from being serious to being humorous, because seriously, I usually can't 'see' your written humour given your past history in your remarks.

If I could 'see' you visually, I'd probably get visual cues, but in that regard, your writing needs improvement, because it has been the source of misunderstanding.

I stand by what I wrote; you wrote mistakenly and still do.

A court house that is not federal in the United States in its public hallways is a 'public place', and although subject to special laws and rules and orders from judges, one may photograph in them.

One can look back in history and find the US has a rich history of in COURTROOM photography which more recently has been curtailed, and it's usually judge's (or Chief Judge's) discetion or state law/Judicial Council rules, etc.)

You have no idea where this photo was taken, (but not in a US federal court), so you can have NO idea of whether is contravened a law or an order or not, and absent that, can only conclude on those bare facts, since it's obviously a public corridor, that it's a public place.

Your analysis of the 'right to privacy' is just wrong; perhaps it's correct for France or Israel, but not the United States, and I'm an expert.

And the use of 'flash' formerly was allowed inside court houses.  I just don't use flash at all/ I regard it primarily as 'sinful' in 'street photography' as it is intrusive, but give special deference to Bruce Gilden, whose 'flash' is done with such skill and aplomb that I coin the 'Gilden exception' to the street 'no flash' rule.

However, in a purely news context (I did this once or twice), flash is acceptable, and I have used it; there is good reason and it's expected.

When two-time killer and train robber Leonard Fristoe came out of the Nevada State Penitentiary's Warden's office after dark, it took a flash on my camera to capture him AND the sign overhead that announced 'Nevada State Penitentiary' in black and white before Fristoe was marched to the cell in the prison he escaped from 47 years earlier. 

He's old and bent and had 47 years of freedom before being returned to serve out his sentence.

Flash does have some need, but not in my street shooting.

I own one or two flashes, but never use them; I'm skillful at available lighting.

You should look up the law before quoting it to me, and use some sort of indicator before you start intending to be humorous, otherwise, with your past history, it will sail past me.

john

John (Crosley)

"If you're going to do humor.....If I could 'see' you visually, I'd probably get visual cues...."

Then we should get skyp??  :-)))))

Meir,

I'd love to Skype but my connection when in Ukraine (where I visit often when not in the USA) is too slow.  Tant pis (French for so much the worse, or in 'Jewish' as my old girlfiend Shoiley from Brownsville used to call the language she spoke  -- 'oy vey!

Shirley is depicted in my prime black and white folder, sitting on my college bed; one of my first portraits.  I still consider it 'very good'.

Father, Joina, was a Kosher butcher. 

Joina and her mother spent all of WWII hiding in a German attic, sheltered by sympathizers, she recounted, but got quite sickly from malnutrition, or so Shoiley told me, long before Schindler's List ever was a gleam in Spielberg's Eye.

And when I looked her unusual name up before Internet days, I found her uncle in Miami Beach, 'Shoiley, Shoiley', oh, Joina's daughter, SHE GOT A DENTIST!!!!!!' and I stopped my quest to locate her to send her her photo from long ago.

She was beautiful, smart and ambitious, and with gorgeous legs - a pair of the most beautiful most men have EVER seen.  Really, she was always followed by swiveled heads!

I hope she reads this, as she's probably a baba easily now.

Pardon my meanderings.

(I also lost my heart over a young black women, daughter of the new head of the Union Theological Seminary, New York City, who transferred to Barnard College from some college I had never heard of, but now recognize as one of the premier Negro colleges in the world. (the term was then used commonly, and not derogatorily).

She was 'brownish' and I never asked about 'race' and didn't care much, but when I heard in her home her father's basso voice from another room (not having seen or met any family members) I KNEW not only was he from a different background than I, but he was a powerful man - and would certainly not have approved what I was doing with his daughter in his living room if he wandered in with his bathrobe and bedroom slippers to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

I would have been TOAST!

His bass voice would put that of James Earl Jones to shame.

And just a few thundering bass words put the fear of God in me.

I imagine he preached hellfire, damnation and brimstone from the pulpit on Sundays at one time, and then moved to new boss the Union Theological Seminary, NYC.  she kept us apart; he probably wouldn't have approved, just as Shoiley's parents didn't approve when they thought I was goyim, until they saw me with my yarmulke, borrowed for the occasion of our first (and only) meeting. 

She was wonderful, but it lasted a short time; she had a law student boyfriend, a former standout college football star going to Columbia Law waiting for her; I'd bet they married (and he never heard of me).

;~))

Only when I heard poppa's voice, did I realize that she was considered 'black', and what did I care? 

She was beautiful, smart, sexy, and liked me a lot, and in my narrow universe, that was all that seemed important and still does.

Skype?

If I get higher speed Internet.

john

John (Crosley)