Re: motion in limine
collinsl,
I've never observed a trial - or watched the couple the BBC have been allowed to show, as experiments. So my only experience is jury duty. And of course there's a lot of it you don't see. But I got the impression (I've done jury duty twice) that a lot goes on in the judges offices, as well as the courtrooms. At least on the circuit courts. There's probably a relatively small number of regular barristers and the judges move around, but in a limited area. So I suspect they snatch a lot of trial planning meetings about stuff for the future - if they happen to be in the same place for other trials.
Talking to the ushers it was clear that there were lots of meetings going on with the judges, that were unrelated to the case we were on that week. I guess some were formal hearings in the court, the others in the offices in the non public bit - that the jury get to walk past on the way from court to jury room (at least in the more modern of my county's two Crown court buildings.
I was surprised how little time I spent in court, as a juror. Even on a week long case. Though that could partly be down to it only being relatively simple assault cases.
It's like an iceberg. The jury only see the top. By design. It's a bit scary, when you can see there's movement behind the curtain, but this has been deliberately designed to exclude telling you vital stuff - you'd like to know to make a better decision. But the very idea of a non-expert jury requires that you be kept in the dark about some things. You're then having to give your verdict on trust.
One case involved a nightclub fight, where everyone had been offered some kind of deal to avoid prosecution in order to try and get their testimony to convinct just one guy of the more serious assault (stamping on someone's head). Understandable, but made me queasy, and slightly disgusted as the person who started the fight smugly told us what happened from the witness box.
We didn't convict because even with being let off prosecution there weren't enough good witnesses. But I still worry as much about not convicting a possible vicious face-stamping bastard as that we might have got it wrong about the one we did convict in a different case.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
