by Brittney Desir & Lissa Paulson
Many millennials like the show Law and Order S.V.U. or the original one, or they want to be a cop or a lawyer or maybe even a judge, but few of them actually know what it feels like to be in court or know what really goes on in court.
For some of our internships, students actually have to be in the court room so Lissa and I found teen literature books, like Convicted and Dangerous Girls that have trial scenes in them. While reading and skimming through them it is almost like you are in the court room yourself because you can really feel the emotions the characters are feeling. For example in Convicted, the reader can really understand how scared the main character felt about testifying against his own father. In Dangerous Girls, the reader is given the transcripts of the interrogations by officers, the trial, a talk show where the accused and imprisoned young girl tells her story of being framed for murder in a foreign country. You are right in the middle of the action.
Monster by Walter Dean Myers is another book, a classic in its own right, and now available in graphic novel format, which gives the blow-by-blow shots of the trial of a 16-year old accused of murder when he was only the look-out. You are reading a movie script of a court scene, literally.
In Stephen King’s COMPILATIONof short stories entitled Different Seasons, there is a great 10-page in-court scene with great dialogue and questioning about Alan Dufresnye’s murder case. According to the narrator of the story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” Dufresnye was only one of about ten men he had met during his life sentence whom he believed was innocent, wrongfully convicted.
Check out these amazing court scene books to get a birds-eye view of what happens in court.
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