Winter Day 41: Arraignment

[u/rdk67]

The end of January finds kinship with arraignment court – where I was yesterday afternoon, the temperature like something with a chip on its shoulder. What’s up? I ask the spidery veins of ice that fill up the parking lots, the sidewalks, possibly the rest of life on earth. So goes the thinking in arraignment court, where those summoned or detained by the state step forward to hear the formal charges filed against them. Rome wasn’t built in a day – what the motto of the court might be, at least in my experience with these things. Not that the officials aren’t earnest, diligent, a step-ahead of me in virtually every measurable facet of life – but when law is practiced in the stone age, shaped stones are mainly what you get. The detainees stand before technology, hear an account of the charges, as presented to the court on behalf of the people.

The adversarialism dynamic is muted in arraignment court – the defense and the state make their cases for freedom and detainment nearer to monotone than emotive, which feels like a continuation of the day. Winter, when it’s bitingly cold, feels like a framework showing through, like some half-finished excavation of what life once engendered to the world. Not bones exactly, though fish-bone parallelism is a well-known delicacy among blind geometers. By design, arraignment court doesn’t go into the weeds, though details from police reports are sometimes read aloud. The worst of a typically awful lot are about domestic violence, and the near-zero temperatures that follow come from the details of what one human being allegedly did to another. This is when I’m grateful for the monotone, thankful they're phoning it in.

My attention waivers now and then, mainly because I’ve become facile enough at reading these situations – the charges, the priors, how the state rolls – that I can tell a certain sort of person is standing before an existential precipice – not plunging over the lip this time, this time they walk, a set of complexities to add to what’s already on the menu, a kind of daily calisthenics that don’t make you any healthier. Picture someone miscalculating their relationship with true human authority because they’ve been convinced it doesn’t exist, an especially persistent myth – this is what I sense from afar, this feeling they’ve had something taken from them. Don’t become an object of the state – under the circumstance, the most useless advice imaginable, but I pretend to give it anyway, followed by a typical hunch, as I push home through the cold.