Courthouse Visit Paper

Courthouse Visit Paper

For my courthouse visit, I visited the Fairfax General District Court on March 12, 2012 at 9:30 am. I attended the hearing of a case that my sister was involved in. The court proceeding was concerning for an arrest on the count of DWI on February 11. When we arrived to court at 9:30, we sat outside the courtroom and they began calling in the cases alphabetically by last name. When my sister’s name was called, we entered the court room and she went to the front and sat down on a table.

The foreman started off by stating everyone who was present in the court including the judge and stated the case. The prosecutor began the proceeding by telling the judge what happened according to the police report, and why my sister was being charged. The prosecutor then called the cop to the stand. After being sworn in, the cop described to the prosecutor about he pulled my sister over because it was late at night and he saw her swerving and she almost hit a median. He said that when he started talking to her, that she had sounded like she was drinking. He made her perform several field sobriety checks and based on how she performed on those and her glossy eyes, he then asked her to blow into the breathalyzer. My sister initially refused the breathalyzer but when the officer told her the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer, she accepted. The officer did not tell the reading that came from the breathalyzer.

After the officer presented his account of the story, my sister’s defense attorney began to ask him questions. Since the attorney’s job is to prove in a court of law that the client they are defending is not guilty, he asked the officer questions that could support that point. Some questions he asked were concerning my sister’s attire the night of the arrest and about the weather conditions that night. The officer was unable to confirm or deny that it was snowing that night, and he was able to confirm that my sister was wearing heels. He did this...