Things I Learned About the Justice System in Oneida County, New York

They will keep the courtroom at a toasty 80 degrees, but only have two "unidentified" toilets on the 3rd floor.

The elevator will take you up to the third floor, but you can't get it to take you back down.

None of the rooms on the third floor have numbers on them or anything indicating whether they are courtrooms, torture chambers, judges' chambers: nothin'!

If the security guy is occupied (in my case talking to some National Guard dude about whether or not he was concealing hand grenades, ha ha) you can walk right through the metal scanner and set it off, yet go unnoticed.

If you stand outside for more than two minutes, you will find two (or more) people screaming at each other about who did what and how the problem is that you took "my f'in' kid" blah, blah, blah. It's depressing.

Overall, one finds that the courthouse reflects the downtrodden nature of our fair county. It is clean, but just worn out in a hundred little intangible ways.

Attorneys on television seem so busy, articulate, and intelligent; attorneys in a real courtroom need a class in rhetoric.

The process is tedious enough that one can almost finish an entire novel, in my case My Name is Asher Lev.

That's it. The case was settled after eight Oneida County residents had to sit and answer the same rephrased questions for almost two hours.

I'm done for six years, but the whole experience has transformed me. I may never watch Law and Order again.