First day in court

Went to court today for the first time.

Back up, back up...

So as part of the fellowship, they send us to court with one of the senior medical examiners so we can watch them testify and get a sense of what we're supposed to do in court and whatever.

(I always have paranoid fantasies that start out "Isn't it true doctor..." and end up exposing some embarrasing something or other like how I didn't do so hot on some test or other or how I once stamped a paper wrong and had to go back and re-do it or something and there I am squirming and making a complete horse's patoote of myself) but this isn't about me, really.

So I can't tell you about the case because everything is not yet said and done or anything but I think it's okay to let on that it was a very violent, very hands-on murder where the victim and the killer had a long, intimate, and fairly complicated relationship. And, as criminal cases go, the whole thing happened about six months ago or so.

So we get the the court, we go through the metal detector (I'm there with a very nice, avulcular forensic pathologist), and we head up to the court and the thing that's most striking is how quiet it is in there and how, well, bored everyone is. I think the only people who were, for lack of a better word, excited to be there were the defendant and me.

The whole time my professor is testifying, all I can think of is how weird it must be for the defendant to have what must have been the most passionate, most violent, most vivid experience in his whole life picked apart so meticulously by a bunch of bored people he doesn't know.

The other thing that was striking was being introduced to people as a "friend of the court," which sounds like I'm meeting blindfolded Justice for lunch or something.