The day out in Norwich

Hullo

I thought I'd say a little about my day, nothing too riveting, just talking about the day out that I had as part of a sociology trip.

Well, it was supposed to be a sociology trip, a trip to Norwich, Norwich Crown court to be exact. We were going to the court as part of a unit 4 which is Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods, which if you do Sociology you probably would understand that, but for now, the sociology course is broken into 4 units, over the 2 year course, 2 units in year 1 and 2 in year 2, we were on this trip for unit 4 which focuses on crime, deviance and punishment, and in that the legal system and our teachers saw it useful to go to the crown court as it was a free trip and we got to be public witnesses in a few court sessions.

So with background out of the way, lets get into some details about the trip, after the 1hr long car journey in which a bunch of 17/18 year olds were playing eye spy (yes, we're that cool) we finally got to the court and we were taken into one of the courts (court 3 of 4) to have a general overview of the runnings of a court case and who was involved and where they all sat and things like that, after which we were split into groups and were able to go and have a view in to one or more of the court sessions, me and 3 others decided to have a look into court 4, which was one of the smaller courts and one of the most productive. n the space of about an hour we went through 7 cases, although not in detail, a lot of postponing until further notice, due to lack of evidence, due to lack of witnesses, and all sorts, so we learnt that court officials are very negotiable, and also very busy. I also observed that loads of them had lots of paper work, large amounts of it, for each session and case they were present in, a few barristers had macbook airs, which would have been a lot more easier to work with and I feel that a lot more barristers should swap to a laptop as it would be so much more practical than carrying around so much paper work, which would take forever to organise and shift through. there were a few laughs in court 4, although I feel we lucked out as court 3 had a very interesting yet sensitive case, which a few people got to watch.

After that, we had a look in court 2, which was much the same as court 4, but a little more interesting, being told that we'd get to see the swearing of the jury in which the jury either swore an oath on the bible or made a promise. We were told that they would do that a 12, so we went at 12 and then that was postponed to 12:45, so we came back at 12:45 and we sat in the session, hearing the fact that the Jury would not be needed, so we sat through the case either way, which was a somewhat interesting.

After that we decided as a group that we had had enough of the court sessions and we went for lunch, having a relatively short walk in to Norwich itself, splitting up again and finding areas to eat, my 'group' went to Subway, having had Subway we had about 40 minutes in which we could explore and go have a wander until we were needed to go back to the minibus to go back to school, we went to the Dr Martens store and then to the very large HMV store before heading back to the group and back to the bus, having another 1hr journey in which I went to sleep.

That was a quick run through of my Sociology trip, into Norwich
-Craig