Your Honor, I Object: Court Testimony and the Expert Witness
So after you arrive at the court building at or near the prescribed time, you get to have a seat in the waiting room, which in the Cleveland Justice Center is a dimly lit pit of an area next to the elevators with sickening 70’s style color and modular seats crowded with defendants and victims alike. Not to mention their mothers, wives, boyfriends and children. Luckily the waiting area serves four courtrooms, so no one knows what trial you’re there for, in case they’re less than happy with your potential testimony. Prosecution witnesses are not permitted in the courtroom when other witnesses are testifying, so if there are any Perry Mason-type theatrics going on in there, you don’t get to see it. So you balance a book on your knees and avoid eye contact. There is nothing glamorous, nothing whatever, about court testimony.
At the other end of the hallway is large windows giving a panoramic, 22-story high view of the city, but no one is allowed to go down there because that is the entrances to the judges chambers. The bailiffs let me, though—because I’m one of “them”. Unfair, yes, but still I avail myself of it, even while I’m cursing the architect.
On top of this, for a building dedicated to security, there’s an unattended parking garage, a stairwell where some doors are locked and some aren’t, and any number of empty hallways, corners and passages in a building populated largely by people who have no reason to be happy with other human beings right at this point in their lives. A lone, small woman armed only with a briefcase, I curse the architect again.
For these reasons I am happy to testify in out-of-county cases, where smaller counties have large, brightly-lit marble hallways. The unpadded wooden benches are a small price to pay for the cheery surroundings and visions of Clarence Darrow strolling along.
Back in the pit, the time you spend waiting can vary anywhere from ten minutes to two days. If you have to wait for jury selection, it will be at least 4 or 5 hours. Sometimes witnesses are jumped because they’re from out of town, or they’re such skitterish personalities that the prosecutor tells you, “If I let her go home I’ll never find her again.” Unless a recess is declared, you cannot go anywhere other than the restroom (briefly) because you might be called.
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