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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.
相关活动：
俄州亚太联盟公共事务实习生毕业典礼
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