A middle-aged man is charged with assault and harassment; the judge issues a temporary order of protection and provides a window during which the man can return home and collect his things. A guy wearing all white is charged with criminal intent; the judge wants to issue a $10,000 cash bail. Instead, he is placed on supervised release after his public defender argues he’s a native New Yorker and has lived in the same place for the last four years, making it unlikely he would flee. A lanky kid wearing a sweatsuit is uncuffed in front of the judge; he’s been charged with menacing in the second degree, but his public defender says his client was the one to call 911. He, too, is placed on supervised release and once he takes his seat in the back of the courtroom, a legal aid representative hands him a MetroCard so he can get home. Another man listens to the long list of disclosures translated by a public employee in a purple suit jacket—that this will appear on his criminal record, that if he is undocumented he may be ejected from the country—before enthusiastically pleading guilty under the condition that some of his charges are dismissed. He is sentenced to time served. “There’s often very little context to what happened,” Callaghan says. She approaches two supervised release agents to see if she can get the name of the judge and fills out the check boxes on her form.
According to Callaghan, who has been court watching off and on since 2017, there’s been a spike in supervised release conditions in these courtrooms since bail reform imposed the idea that judges should take advantage of the “least restrictive means” to ensure someone returns for their court date. But on Monday, she says, she watched a judge try to impose a $75,000 bail on an unemployed person. The public defender argued that wasn’t reasonable given that the person in question didn’t have a job or a home. The judge suggested $30,000 instead. “As if it makes a difference,” Callaghan said.
She got into this work after going to arraignments for friends and an ex-partner in Seattle, navigating the system for the first time. “People are there to see loved ones, and there’s no one telling them what’s going on. The court officer isn’t the most inviting, so there are a lot of confused people.” At the end of her shift, she’ll look for the court officer and try to get the docket numbers she needs—technically, they should be listed on the board in front of the courtroom, but in reality that’s almost never the case. Back at home, she’ll enter everything she collected into an online form, volunteer-generated data points to be collated at some later date.