Another day-another dialog

Paulette has been sick and I’m exhausted. We are feeling like we need So we load up into Paulette’s car and drive for another day of shooting, learning and talking. We start off at the Martinsburg City Municipal building. We selected that venue because Judge Sanders had spoken about the photos of police officers that hung in the hallways. The City Manager gave us permission to film, and we did. The photographs turned out to be a group of kind of rag-tag hodge-podge photos which seem to date from the early twentieth century. We also explored the experience of the defendant in this courtroom, and found that a defendant wouldn’t be able to see the witness testifying. The bench is so big in the small space, that Paulette could only see about half of my face over the bench.
From there, we went to stop at Patterson’s Drug Store. You may recall that we stopped her before for Paulette to get her ammonia coke-a rite of passage into the bar. I remembered that when I first became a member of the Morgantown bar that the attorneys and judge would meet at Murphy’s in the morning before court. I had heard that the judge used to do the same thing at Pattersons. I was telling the story and Paulette was filming when one of Martinsburg’s old timers who I’ve seen stopped. He wanted to be on tape and wanted to flirt with Paulette and I. We did for a while, and then I asked him about the judge. He remembered that Judge Scinscendiver would “hold court” there before the beginning of the business day.
About that time, a group of assistant prosecutors, most of whom we did early interviews with, were coming back from lunch. They stopped and it was a perfect backdrop to discuss the sense of community among lawyers and the space to develop that sense. We then returned to some of the issues we had identified that we wanted to discuss, including the openness of the courthouse, the public property nature of the courthouse, and of course, the women’s witness room. One of the prosecutors had used the women’s witness room to talk to all of her witnesses, including men, before they moved to the new courthouse. One of the youngest prosecutors thought it would be great to have courtyard near the courthouse for the community to gather. Another thought that was a terrible idea, and would just attract vagrants.
After that very dynamic and vibrant dialog concluded, we returned to the old courthouse to revisit the courtroom, reshoot some of the Women’s witness room and dialog with John Small, the county clerk. It was here, in the Berkeley County Courthouse, that Paulette got the great idea to make a trailer, Extreme Courtroom Makeover. She was feeling puny, so I went along.
The dialog with John Small was beyond wonderful. It was kind of like everything we done to that point lead to our meeting. He told so many important stories, but the one theme was that the courthouse is a place that belongs to the people. When he was growing up, the public toilets downtown were in the courthouse. Both the ladies’ room and the men’s room had attendants. His mother would stop and visit with the attendant when they came to town. When a jury trial was starting, the janitor rang the bell. And the only time Mr. Small ever goes into the women’s witness room is when the toilet is stopped up and he needs to unclog it with the plunger. His stories were so rich and insightful, I could go on forever, but you’ll just have to see the film.
One of the things that Mr. Small brought up and that we knew we needed further footage of was the new elaborate security at the judicial building. So that was our last stop. The judicial building is no longer in the center of town, but it’s just a few blocks away, surrounded by a giant parking lot and across the street from the cemetery.
The bailiffs and the head of the security couldn’t have been nicer, more polite nor more efficient. While they were not willing to be interviewed, they told us about the process for the security which involved national standards and an architect from the city. They reported that people do complain about what they have to go through to get into the building, but the bailiffs recognized how important it is for folks to feel safe in the courthouse. It is such a difficult tension. When we got into the courtroom, I was reminded of how I do like the physical space of those rooms, being circular and spacious, well let, comfortable. However, I couldn’t ignore what it took to get there.