I was going to write an article this week about my experience as a victim/witness in a court room trial. I would have written something about how long ago the actual event took place, about how eyewitness testimonies are unreliable even a few hours after an incident, and how prolonging the trial only serves as a tactic for the defense and their attorney to better undermine the reliability of any witnesses (or victims) unlucky enough to receive a subpoena to force them into going to court. I would have written about anxiousness going up to testify against someone. I would have described (without revealing names or specifics, though nobody has told me that I can't talk about what happened) what happens when you go to court in the event that anyone reading my article was in the same position and wanted to be aware of what to expect.
But I can't write about it, because when I showed up to court on Thursday for a trial with a date that had been set back in October, I was told by a rather unpleasant receptionist that it was pushed back to April sometime Wednesday night, and that “Sometimes these things happen.” (Apparently, according to my friend, I looked like I was going to explode. I could have.)
Some background information for context about how long this has been going on: the actual incident happened in September of 2014. It took a long time for an arraignment to happen, and then pre-trial dates kept getting moved and pushed back (though this is possibly because of the snowstorms of early 2015). The defendant of the case pleaded “not guilty” despite evidence to the contrary, but because of that, there had to be a trial date set. The date when the trial would be set kept getting moved back. It was over a year later that the date was finalized.
Maybe I wouldn't be so irritated by the change of date if I hadn't already taken time out of my student teaching to show up. Nobody ever called my friend or myself to let us know (both of us being victims/witnesses who had received an innumerable amount of letters with updates about the case's legal proceedings and dates on which those updates occurred) so, ignorant of the change of date, we woke up around 6:30 a.m. and made our way to the district court.
Full offense: if you're going to force someone to show up to a trial they want absolutely no part of under the threat of a warrant being put out for them should they not appear, at least go through the effort of giving them a quick phone call if you're moving the trial to April.
