Most of the hearings reported here are District Court trial sessions. That means the charges are relatively minor. District Court trials are not jury trials; they are bench trials, heard by the judge only.

Each real trial in District Court takes an hour or two at least. Since there are usually 20 or more cases each morning, trying all of them is impossible.

Only a small minority of the people who appear at a trial session in District Court end up in real trials, with a judge determining guilt or innocence. The vast majority of people who appear in these sessions have their charges dropped there. A large proportion of these people have nevertheless been incarcerated for weeks or months “before trial” – with severely limited communication outside the jail, the constant threat of violence and disease, and all the other horrors of incarceration. In this way, a large proportion of people who are arrested on minor charges are severely punished without any trial, ever. They are punished before a trial is even an option.

Cases can be dropped by being stetted or nolle prossed (see the Glossary), or can be continued to a later date – on which, again, they will probably be dropped.

A case that is not dropped may end in a plea deal rather than a trial, or may be “indicted” – which means the District Court sends it over to the Circuit Court for trial.

It can also happen that a person’s several charges are treated differently: some dropped, some tried in District Court, etc.

We do not know how to write about all this in a way that shows  the true horror. We wish more people would go to court and see this system for themselves. If people only knew, change might come.