“Don’t celebrate in here,” warned my co-accused’s boyfriend just after the magistrate acquitted us, and we had to sit on our hands to stop from punching the air.
Acquitted! Acquitted! We were not guilty.
I didn’t dare even look at the prosecutor at the other end of the bar table, and the police sitting behind him. There existed between us an animus that had grown over the course of the day. I couldn’t make eye contact, let alone shake hands at the matter’s conclusion. To gloat seemed somehow dangerous.
So we rushed to the elevator as soon as our case was dismissed, and screamed for two floors until someone else got in. Down in the cool tiled foyer of the Downing Centre, with a baby in tow we let loose, and practically danced with delight.
The foyer of the Downing Centre is a place where emotion flows, undisguised.
A woman was weeping in a man’s arms. They were full, heaving sobs of the truly heartbroken.
Others looked sick with tension, pale and sweating in the heat, in their borrowed suits. Elsewhere ill-at-ease family groups formed protective circles around wayward sons.
In each tableau, an immense drama.
But we, we were overjoyed, jubilant, hugging and high-fiving, the only happy people in the Downing Centre (or so it seemed), our voices overlapping as we recounted the drama of our small trial: a tricky question in cross-examination, a damning bit of CCTV footage, the repeated gestures I made to my co-accused to pull her bra strap up when giving evidence.
In the foyer, the anxiety of going to court was suddenly released and the feeling of joy was so pure it felt almost chemical.
Courts are such a binary process. You either win or you lose. It’s a shock in this day and age of consolation prizes and encouragement awards that when you lose at court, you really lose. It’s a proper fight.
What brought us there was a small matter but it was important to us. Me and my friend were challenging seatbelt fines (I, the passenger, was accused of not wearing my seatbelt) but we felt that righteous indignation of the wrongly accused: “I didn’t do it! I was wearing my seatbelt! Don’t punish me, it isn’t fair.”
So we didn’t pay the fine, and elected to have the matter contested in court. Almost six months after the fine was issued, we were in the magistrate’s court, representing ourselves and far from certain we would win.
Of all the experiences to be had in life, going to court has to be one of the most stressful. A colleague who had been involved in a lengthy commercial dispute warned me the day before that it can “suck you in, take over your life”.
There is the expense and the days which in some cases can turn into weeks, months and even years of litigation (although this was unlikely in our matter).
There’s the organisation and time required to marshal and order your evidence.
Then there’s the confidence and conviction required to give evidence, and to do so under the stress of cross-examination.
There’s the procedure you must follow, which can be exacting and intimidating to the uninitiated. The language is so arcane. What does it mean when a matter is listed for mention? What is a contest? What is an adjournment? When do you have to pay the other side’s costs? And what are those costs likely to be? How do you address the magistrate? What do you wear? Will they get angry at you if you stuff it up?
In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag wrote: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Court can also be classified as “that other place.” It is a whole, discrete system of rules and rituals, and unless you are required to go to court, these are things you can remain ignorant about. But on entering the legal system you are immediately made aware of your ignorance. The deck is stacked in favour of prosecutors who are in court day after day and know the drill.
Why else do people hire expensive lawyers? To enter it alone and unarmed is a folly.
I was reasonably well equipped to enter that world. I had previously been a lawyer and had appeared for people in similar low-level traffic offences and criminal matters. I had friends who were lawyers who provided me advice for free, and drafted letters to the prosecutors, and I had a magistrate who was excellent – who explained the law and proceedings to us in plain English.
But still, I was sick with nerves in the days leading up to the court date.
The procedure for challenging a fine is intimidating, confusing, and took an enormous amount of resources on all sides.
Maybe we should just pay the fine, I thought more than once. But we didn’t. We fought the law, and we won.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist.
