Why no, as a matter of fact I haven't been posting much this past week. God forbid I should get just a LITTLE bit busy, ya know? Yesterday, I came home and literally just fell into bed and slept for about 45 minutes at the end of the day.
Beginning on Wednesday, my nightmare began. We had a calendar call of about 85 cases in the morning, followed by an arraignment docket of about 75 cases. Then, on Thursday, we had an arraignment docket of about 70 cases, followed by an afternoon's worth of motions and hearings that went past 5pm. Friday morning and afternoon we had a combined calendar call of about 165 cases. So, over the course of about 3 days, I processed about 400 files. Ordinarily, that's almost 3 weeks worth of work---in 3 days. Making the whole scenario even a little bit more difficult was the fact that I have a brand new docket clerk getting my files ready for me, and in typical clerk's office fashion....she isn't really trained. I'd be working on my prepartion of the dockets, and be missing like 10 files. This never happened with my old docket clerk, and I guess I got a little spoiled, because its more than a little stressful to have to tell the judge that "I don't have that file". Part of the reason we were so busy was making up for our hurricane Katrina days off a couple of weeks ago, and then we were trying to make up for....well....quite frankly all the days off that a certain someone takes (ahem). All that combined made for one tired young man. Well, maybe not "young", but you get the drift.
One quick "tales from the courthouse" story that happened on Wednesday. We had scheduled a non jury for late in the morning, around 11:30am.....and when the time came and went, the defendant hadn't showed up. So the judge issued a warrant for him and we all left. When court started back at 1:30pm, sure enough...there was the defendant (a homeless guy by the way). So the judge calls him up and asks him where he was. The guy is either cocky or stoned...or maybe drunk (or a combination of all three) and says....
"Hey, I done TOLD you all that I might be late.....so what's up? What's the big deal?"
"Well sir," the judge says, "the big deal is that we were ready to have a non jury trial and you weren't here....so now its going to have to be rescheduled."
"Well where's their witness. Was he here?"
"He was on phonestandby waiting to see if you were going to show."
"Well then you really didn't even miss me then....the officer wasn't here!"
"Ya know sir...I'm starting to wonder about the way your acting if maybe you're not under the influence of some alcohol or something and I'm going to ask my baliff if she doesn't maybe smell anything coming from your breath."
Now, here's where the best part of the story happens. The baliff sort of moves up next to him....ya know...just to see if she gets a whiff of any beer or something....and the guy turns his head towards her and like blows right into her face. The expression on my baliff's face was like one of those Mastercard commercials. Priceless.
"Deputy," the judge asks, "do you smell any alcohol?"
"Uh....no judge.....not alcohol."
Let's remember....homeless guy. Chances are, he didn't have time for a tic tac before he came to court. You do the math.
Later,
Jeff
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