一个华裔青年在美国地方法院的实习经历

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APAPA Internship Summary: What I Have Learned at Lorain Municipal Courts

Barbara Yang

Senior from Laurel School, Cleveland, Ohio

My experience with the criminal law and the justice system has been mostly through two dimensional mediums. I had taken an English course that concentrated on the privatization of prisons and the judicial system; we had learned through reading myriad first person narratives of correctional officers, and watched many interviews of prisoners on death-row. My other experience with criminal litigation is through watching the serial TV drama Suits. The melodramatic and intense tableau of what courtroom conduct looks like depicted by these narratives I was presented with was completely shattered when I was brought into Lorain Municipal Courts.

As Mr. Graves, my mentor, asked Grace, a fellow intern, and I to slide into the jury box to watch the pretrial proceedings commence, my expectations were completely subverted. Due to COVID-19, alleged perpetrators who were detained in the county jail were “brought” to the arraignment hearings via Zoom calls. As the judge spoke, the courtroom bustled with defense attorneys and prosecutors; I couldn’t have imagined something more different - my mind had painted a picture of a solemn proceeding in which everyone was aloof and silent. As the judge asked the first man on the stand whether or not he would plead guilty so that his next court date could be arranged, he began to appeal to the judge, “I can’t make it on that date, I have a doctors appointment… I was stabbed 13 times, my eye sockets are bruised, the stab penetrated my lung so my lung collapsed, my T1 and T5 vertebrae …” As he recounted his injuries, I sucked in a breath. This man was being charged with domestic abuse, and had been charged with physically assaulting his wife twice prior to this conviction, yet as he pleaded about his injuries, I felt sorry for him. And it finally hit me, simply reading and learning about the prison and court systems is completely different from actually experiencing it. This internship had bridged my disconnect from my sheltered world to cruel reality; the internship also forced me to grapple with the complexities of the decision-making in the real world.

As I attended more court hearings, listened to the charges of each person, as well as the police report on what occurred on the day of the crime, I slowly began to come to the realization that the world isn’t black or white, nor can someone’s actions and the consequences they “deserve” be summed up in a single sentence or conviction. A woman came into the courtroom to get her domestic violence misdemeanor record expunged because she would not have been able to get into nursing school and provide for her child if the record wasn’t hidden. So in that moment, the judge and the state, in this case, Mr. Graves, the prosecutor that’s representing the state, will have to make a decision as to whether the need for punishment for the woman’s sins in the past outweighs her need to carve a brighter future for herself and her child. In that moment, I froze as I imagined myself in Mr. Graves’ position, if I had to completely change a person’s life with one sentence - one recommendation to the judge - what would I do? The moral dilemma left me scratching my head as we left the courtroom.

Each day at the internship and the courthouse, we were presented with many similar dilemmas. The internship was constantly exciting and kept me on my toes as I had to confront many ethical challenges and wrestle with conflicting narratives that arise from my own interpretations of a case and my mentor’s line of argumentation for that case. This experience was really rewarding in that it gave me new perspectives on things that I previously had only learned about in class and compelled me to shift my paradigm. I am so grateful for APAPA for providing me with this opportunity to connect and engage with my community, helping me understand the impact of a single action, as well as the importance of nuanced thinking and representation within the justice system and American society as a whole.

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