Courthouse

“ Booth with his big bass drum, followed by a motley slum crowd, leads to the most impressively magnificent place within the ken of a small-town Middle Westerner. This is an Illinois courthouse square. As a matter of fact, it is bleak, treeless, dust-blown, mud-moated—the dome of the courthouse in the middle, flanked on all sides with ugly brick blocks and alternating wooden shacks with corrugated iron false fronts; but this is splendor to the mind of the narrator. ”

“ The courthouse is a handsome edifice of brick, two stories, with a neat spire. The neighbouring region is fertile and healthy; well proportioned with prairie and timber, well watered by the Macoupin and Apple Creeks,183 and well populated by a sturdy, thriving race of yeomanry. This is, indeed, strictly an agricultural village; and, so far as my own observation [46] extended, little attention is paid or taste manifested for anything else. ”

“ A number of women are sitting working together in a big room not unlike an old English tithe barn in its timbered construction, but with windows high up next the roof. It is furnished as a courthouse, with the floor raised next the walls, and on this raised flooring a seat for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his right, and a bar to put prisoners to on his left. ”

“ The May 1798 Fairfax County Court Order Book did specify that the courthouse should be forty-by-thirty feet with a twelve-foot portico, the gaol forty-by-twenty, the clerk's office twenty-by-eighteen and covered with slate or tile, a gaoler's house twenty-four-by-eighteen feet, and that stocks, pillory and whipping post also be provided by letting the entire [Pg 59] "... building of the same to the lowest bidder." ”

“ Two policemen had to clear a way for the carriage containing the witnesses for the prosecution to draw up. And when it stopped and its party alighted, the same two policemen had to walk before them to open a path for their entrance into the courthouse.
Here every lobby, staircase, passage, and anteroom was full of curious people, pressed against each other. These people could not get into the courtroom, which was already crowded as full as it could be packed ”

“ The Public Buildings — The Jail— Courthouse — Town Hall — Fire-house — School Buildings — Wallace Library — Normal School — Government Building, &c.
As it was found necessary to have courts to punish crimes, to settle disputes and to enforce law and order in the Commonwealth for the good of society, it was also found necessary to have buildings in which to hold the courts, to keep their records, and a place to confine criminals until they were tried by the courts, and then to punish them after conviction for their crimes. ”

“ Middlesex County needed a new courthouse and jail. In 1757 a new courthouse had been built on the site of Lyceum Hall, but in 1813 there was a need for something better; whereupon the Lechmere Point Corporation forthwith built a courthouse and jail in East Cambridge, and presented them, with the ground on which they stood, to the county. In 1818, a lot of land in the Port, bounded by Harvard, Prospect, Austin, and Norfolk streets, was appropriated for a poorhouse. ”

“ Courthouses, like churches, are shown in towns, and here and there in the country. They are indicted by a symbol which could be described as a letter “U” which is squared rather than rounded. The courthouse at Edenton is hard to identify ”

“ The statutes of the United States, and the established practice of the courts, require that the judge perform a very large share of his judicial labors at what is called 'chambers.' This chamber work is as important, as necessary, as much a discharge of his official duty, as that performed in the courthouse. Important cases are often argued before the judge at any place convenient to the parties concerned, and a decision of the judge is arrived at by investigations made in his own room, wherever he may be ”

“ Not far from the old Courthouse stands another building typifying all that is modern—the largest office building in the world, a highly creditable structure, occupying an entire city block, built from designs by St. ”

“ It is therefore ordered by the Court, that such trespass ... will be punished to the full extent of the law. [156]
The bell referred to by the Court was a standard feature of many Virginia courthouses, and was rung to announce the convening of court sessions. In the Fairfax County Courthouse, the bell was hung in a cupola on the roof, and rung with a bell-pull passing through the building's attic to the balcony level of the courtroom. ”

“ Some person or persons have entered the Court House Building in the night, without authority and have damaged Said building and have greatly annoyed the citizens living nearby by violently ringing the bell. ”

“ A hearth of brick extends 18 inches out from the fireplace. Opposite the fireplace is a 12 by 18 inch plastered masonry pier extended up from the exterior wall at the rear of the portico on the first floor below. In the ceiling next to the pier is located a 30 by 36 inch opening into the attic, with a ladder built into the partition wall immediately below.
Bench, Bar and Jury Box. Across the front of the courtroom is a railing separating the judges bench, jury box, and space for counsel tables from the central section of the courtroom. ”

“ Chamber business may be done, and often is done, on the street, in the judge's own house, at the hotel where he stops, when absent from home, or it may be done in transitu, on the cars in going from one place to another within the proper jurisdiction to hold court. Mr. Justice Field could, as well, and as authoritatively, issue a temporary injunction, grant a writ of habeas corpus, an order to show cause, or do any other chamber business for the district in the dining-room at Lathrop, as at his chambers in San Francisco, or in the court-room. ”

“ A court of justice is built everywhere much in the same fashion—​a throne for the judge, benches right and left for the sheriff and municipal authorities, boxes on each side for the juries, separate pews for the warder and clerk of the court, convenient seats for the barristers. Then there is the witness-box, the dock, and benches piled tier over tier for the convenience of the spectators, and, as a matter of course, the ventilation is radically bad. ”

“ When the court was opened that morning, at the usual hour, and the expectant multitude rushed, scrambled, and tumbled in, to fight first for front places and then for any place at all; the lawyers—who had entered by the judge's private stairway—were already seated inside the railing, chatting and laughing with cheerful indifference; the prisoner, looking worn and haggard, was seated in his place, and the two drowsy jurymen were already commencing to yawn. ”

“ We have brought them back with us, and other people are [Pg 303] munching food, too, in the dust, the heat, the squalor of this room from which the majesty of justice has departed with the red robed tribunal, the jury, and the prisoner. There is a hubbub of excited talk and much discussion. Municipal guards forget to keep order and chat with us and with the barristers of the probabilities and possibilities of the verdict. Every now and then there is a hubbub of excitement and a sudden deathly stillness. The little door, beyond which we can see those red and grey carpeted stairs, has opened. ”

“ About the Court-house the streets were thronged for a square on either side—horses, carriages, men. The autumn court was an important one. Farmers were not so pressed, there was leisure to look outside of their own fields; men of the town, of distant towns, of farms far and near, of mountain cabins, thronged the steps and the bit of green about the house and the street, back to the small houses and narrow pavements built about it like a court when the town was a village a century and more ago. ”

“ From seven o'clock in the morning a crowd was stationed at the iron gates, and an hour before the trial commenced the hall was full of the privileged. Before the entrance of the magistrates, and indeed frequently afterwards, a court of justice, on days when some especial trial is to take place, resembles a drawing-room where many persons recognize each other and converse if they can do so without losing their seats ”

“ The press enters in force, considerable portions of the court, and also of the gallery above the jury, being reserved for its representatives.
Barristers drop in, eager as the people who are unfamiliar with the courts, and quickly filling their seats, there accumulates a standing group, which remains about the door all day.
The occupants of the court, with scarcely an exception, deport themselves as men and women come to witness a comedy, not a grim tragedy—​talking, laughing, joking, and congratulating themselves on their luck in gaining admission on so famous an occasion. ”

“ I agree with the Court that a criminal trial, in the constitutional sense, cannot take place where the courtroom is a bedlam and either the accused or the judge is hurling epithets at the other. A courtroom is a hallowed place where trials must proceed with dignity and not become occasions for entertainment by the participants, by extraneous persons, by modern mass media, or otherwise. ”

“ Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet. Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. ”

“ The modern court-room is only an adapted continuation of a medieval idea. On the raised dais under an unsanitary and dusty canopy of green plush sits the judge; instead of a sceptre he holds the gavel. ”

“ They build their great law court building (the architecture ecclesiastical) so as to provide an entrance hall of imposing proportions which they use once a year; and to get this fine hall they have to make their court rooms, which they must use all the time, dark and small and inaccessible. They think as much of that once-a-year ceremony of opening their courts as they think of the even justice that they dispense; somehow they feel that the justice depends on the ceremony. ”

“ To draw away that filthy, nasty mess which assembles at the corner of this public square. For a week or two past, that court-house has been thronged with men, and it is darker than the bowels of hell. ”

“ The next step is the hearing before a Police Magistrate at Bow or Marlborough Streets, or at any one of the like courts in London which, although of minor importance, are dignified tribunals. The court room is entered by two small doors, one for the witnesses and audience, the other for officials and solicitors, and there is another passage leading from the cells through which the prisoners are brought to a dock. This dock, as in all criminal courts, is at the far end of the room from the magistrate. ”

“ The court house has always been a very attractive place to the people of the frontier. It supplied the place of theatres, lecture and concert rooms, and other places of interest and amusement, in the older settlements and towns. The leading lawyers and judges were the star actors, and had each his partisans. Hence crowds attended the courts to see the judges, to hear the lawyers contend with argument, and law, and wit for success, victory, and fame. The merits and ability of the leading advocates ”

“ The best preparation for the scenes met with in [Pg 278] a court of justice, is the house of prayer; though even here there is a strange contrast between the peace and quietness of the church, and the bustle, broil, and turmoil usually attendant on the administration of criminal justice.
At twelve o’clock, on the day of trial, August 9th, 1797, the Lord Chief Baron Macdonald took his seat upon the bench, in the criminal court. Mr. Justice Heath presided in the Nisi Prius. ”

“ At the judge's right are the jury, seated in a box of either two rows of six or three rows of four, the back row being nearly on a level with the judge. In front of the judge, but so much lower as to oblige him to stand on his chair when whispering to his lordship, sits his "associate," a barrister in wig and gown, whom we should designate as the clerk of the court.
Facing the associate is the "solicitors' well," at the floor level, where, on the front row of benches, sit the solicitors in ordinary street dress. ”

“ Every prisoner, whether committed for trial or already sentenced, and the prisoners under suspicion who have been reprieved from the closest cells—in short, every one in confinement in the Conciergerie takes exercise in this narrow paved courtyard for some hours every day, especially the early hours of summer mornings. This recreation ground, the ante-room to the scaffold or the hulks on one side, on the other still clings to the world through the gendarme, the examining judge, and the Assize Court. It strikes a greater chill perhaps than even the scaffold. ”

“ He generally sits every week-day for three or four hours in the justice-room of the Mansion-House; presides over the sittings of the Court of Aldermen, where they do all but talk each other to death. He is a judge of the Central Criminal Court, and of the Sessions at Guildhall; holds eight courts a year as Conservator of the Thames; besides being a justice of the peace for Southwark, a trustee of St. Paul’s, and a governor both of Greenwich Hospital and King’s College. ”

“ There are two jails, one for the boys, one for the girls; a library, a school-house, a chapel, bank, and a well-organized banking and currency system. There is a court, and there is a judge, who is elected every year by the citizens. From this court an appeal lies in certain cases to a Supreme Court chosen by the boys from the Board of Trustees, but this court only passes on the regularity of the proceedings in the court below, that is, on what might be regarded as equivalent to constitutional and jurisdictional questions. ”