Another life

I spent the day at the courthouse in Gatineau today at preliminary inquiries (sort of like a grand jury, without the jury, if you're a Law and Order fan). Rather than navigate the murky worlds of publication bans and how-to-avoid-trouble-in-blogging, I'll just link to the story.

While they were changing witnesses, another lawyer came in with his client. If you've never been to a court, you'd probably think of it as a rigid, formal place. Instead, sometimes the scheduling for simple matters is as easy as asking who's in the room and whether their lawyer is there. I think this was one of those cases. The judge had handled a few cases before this inquiry started but maybe the client hadn't been available earlier. Anyway, in the midst of the hearing for charges of prostitution, alcohol and crack abuse, this other case is a harassment charge. And the complainant is dropping the charge. The judge explained to her that essentially, this means it never happened. If she charges the guy again, she can't provide this incident as evidence, she can't take this back, etc. etc. Has she been threatened or intimidated into dropping the charge? No. And by the way, she's looking into self-esteem courses.

I saw a similar case in j-school and it made me wonder how long you'd have to sit in a courtroom before seeing it each day. In the j-school-era case, the crown got the woman on the stand and was doing her best to to get the story out of her. So your door ended up broken? Yes. How did it break? There was pressure applied to it. Pressure? Yes. What kind of pressure? Well, he applied pressure with his foot, and the door just broke. The crown gave up and dropped the charges.

I had been happy to get out of my apartment for the first time all week, and excited about covering a relatively big trial. But all of this certainly reminded me that there's a whole other world out there that's very real to the people involved.