Wheels of Justice Grind Slowly, Law Day Students Find

Sounding a bit annoyed, the high school student wanted to know where the action was. Where, he asked the judge, was all the emotion and drama and tension that always seemed to fill the courtroom scenes on television?

Superior Court Judge Judith M. Ryan had to laugh.

“Well,” she confessed, “the truth is that most of the time this place doesn’t look a whole lot like ‘L.A. Law.’ It just doesn’t get that glamorous all the time.”

That was the scene played out in courtrooms around the county Monday as about 200 high school students, taking part in the local celebration of Law Day, got to observe and take part in the workings of the legal system by tagging along with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys in their daily routines.

What the students found within the staid halls of justice was not the high drama of Perry Mason and “L.A. Law,” but rather the daily routine of mounds of court papers, prolonged and inevitably delayed proceedings and a close attention to the minutiae of the law that rarely left time for theatrics.

And even afterwards, some of them still wanted to be lawyers.

“Hopefully, I’m going to be doing this 6 or 7 years from now and it really helps to know what it’s all about first,” said Geena Merrill, 17, a senior at Whittier Christian High School in La Habra.

“It’s really a lot harder than it looks,” she said. “So much goes on behind the scenes that you never see or even think about.”

The many stages of an investigation, the booking of a suspected criminal, the impetus and resolution of a civil dispute, the arguments and tactics of lawyers jockeying for position in the courtroom--all were laid before the students for up-close inspection in their whirlwind tour of the legal system.

“What we’re really trying to do here is to show these kids that the justice system does have a human side--to personalize a subject that can often seem inaccessible to the public,” said attorney Tonya Prescott, coordinator of the program for the Orange County Bar Assn.

Added Deputy Dist. Atty. Guy Ormes, who helped show some would-be prosecutors the demands of the job: “To some extent, they’ve seen the real world of criminal justice--where you get ready for a case, go to the courtroom, nothing happens and your case gets continued and you have to come back later.”

Now in its third year, the “Youth in the Law” program was among a series of events--including public seminars and educational programs, a picnic, musical events and a dance--that were staged by the bar association to commemorate Law Day, a nationwide celebration.