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I have to go to court this week… but no, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll explain,…

I had a brief ‘dabbling’ with the courts system a good few years ago when I was arrested by a rookie garda in Dublin city centre. At the time, I was in a group of people walking up a main street in the city. Without going into too much detail, a few guys in our group (whom I didn’t know) started causing hassle with some club bouncers, who then called the gardaí – a number of whom showed up and started – naturally – asking us to clear away from the area.

Having no wish to get in trouble, I started to leave – but stopped for a chat with another of the gardaí present, actually asking him to explain a section of a legal act that I was curious about – and that another garda had quoted me previously – and he was happy to oblige, explaining it in detail. I got the feeling from him that he realised that I was just a bystander, not involved in the incident at the club door, but while he was chatting with me, the first garda – a trainee – the one who had originally instructed me to move on – came over and formally arrested me for being drunk and disorderly and not moving on when asked.

I tried to explain to him that I was in the process of leaving and was just asking this (older, more accommodating, friendlier) garda something. I tried to explain that this garda was happy to talk to me and seemed to understand that I wasn’t involved in the incident. I tried to explain that I was not drunk (I’d had a single pint of cider… I’d shown up late to the party I was coming into town for) and was not disorderly and was still more than happy to move on… But all this fell on deaf ears – he told me that it was too late for explanations and that I was now “nicked” (his words!).

He threw me into the back of a paddy wagon where a foreign man (looked like a Romanian, if I recall correctly) who was in a questionable state of consciousness – and covered in his own blood, fell around the place – including hitting off me a few times and getting blood on my clothes – during the bumpy ride to Pearse Street station, where – as a first timer – my evenings experience was entirely uncomfortable and unpleasant.

The rookie garda had essentially decided I was guilty by association. Those among our group who caused hassle and got “physical” with the bouncers had gotten quite a kicking and the gardaí didn’t actually apprehend them. I, as essentially a bystander, was being brought in and labelled as guilty by association. What pissed me off was that he couldn’t say that I had attacked anyone, or tried to gain entry to the club by force, or whatever – but rather than let me leave as an innocent bystander (which I was), he pinned a charge of drunk & disorderly on me with a secondary charge of refusing to obey the directions of a garda. It seemed to me at the time that he, as a trainee, was just itching to make his first arrest and I was just his unlucky target that evening. I do feel sorry for the gardaí sometimes with the amount of drunken and violent morons they have to put up with on the streets of our cities, but mistakes do happen and my case was honestly one of them.

It’s worth noting that I requested a breathalyser test to prove my sobriety on a number of occasions – on the street after the rookie accused me of being drunk and disorderly, in the paddy wagon on the way to the garda station, and in the station itself – and was refused each time. The gardaí in the station even had the gall, as I remember, to infer that the shock of my experience would be enough to have made me that much more sober in the 10 minutes since I’d been picked up that it would render a breathalyser test pointless. That left me fairly dumbfounded, but I was still curious how they intended to make a charge of drunk & disorderly stick when they would have no physical evidence of my apparent drunkenness.

It struck me later though (after taking legal advice) that as I technically didn’t “move on” (leaving my curiosity get the better of me and stopping for a chat with a garda, asking a question about law…), – as there were a number of gardaí present and it would have been their word against mine in court (where they would presumably back each other up in saying that I was acting in a drunken manner), and as the judge would almost undoubtedly believe the word of a number of the ‘protectors of the peace’ over a nerdy young citizen – I decided not to contest the charge when it came to my own appearance in court.

In the court, after entering this plea of no contest (or, essentially “guilty”), I had to listen to a fairly patronising lecture on how decent upstanding citizens should behave on the streets of our nations capital and answer back in a nice-as-pie “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” kind of way while biting my lip and holding back from what I really wanted to say. I felt disgusted and annoyed that I could be somehow associated with the other people I saw there that day – many of them drug filled scumbags and dregs of society. Considering it was my first (and since then, only) offense, I was left off without a criminal record and a fine to be paid to a charity.

Anyway, this week I have to go to court for an entirely different matter. In fact, what court I go to and what case I am present for doesn’t really matter (although the more interesting or ‘juicy’ the case, the better!) as I’m not directly involved this time! I always thought it would be interesting to serve on a jury – to actually be instrumental in the serving of justice. I haven’t gotten that far yet- I’m just going to be an observer.

Everyone has the constitutional right to observe the process of justice in public by visiting a court and watching a case in progress from the public gallery. As part of my college course, I have a Media Law class, and our mid-term assignment in that module involves doing exactly that and reporting back on our observations. It’ll be interesting, as it will only be my second time in court – but it couldn’t be any more different from my first!