Real life more intense than TV

During my internship at the Ann Arbor News, I had the privilege of getting to know the court reporter pretty well. He told me a lot of his stories from the field. I could not believe that people actually stand up in the middle of court and say "Objection, leading!" How cool. \nOne day, he asked me if I wanted to go to a preliminary hearing for a murder trial. A preliminary hearing is a hearing before the actual trial where the judge determines if there is enough of a case to send it on to court. Of course, I jumped at the chance. \nI knew all the background behind the case. The whole scene went down at a party in an apartment complex near Eastern Michigan University. The music was loud, there were about 100 people there, and the keg was flowing. \nAllegedly, the accused murderer walked in and started to get into a fight with a bunch of the guys at the party about the volume of the music. Words were exchanged, testosterone levels rose, and the man took out his knife. \nAs he was swinging, the crowd tried to restrain him. He broke free from the crowd, stumbled forward, stabbed one person, then another, and left the apartment. It was one thing to read the police report on newsprint, quite another to hear it out of one of the victim's mouths.\nThe court room was small and tightly packed with witnesses, friends, family, and reporters. Witness after witness poured out their versions of the story. Each identified the defendant in his bright orange prison uniform. The defense lawyer was on top of his game. He got each witness to admit that they had discussed their stories with the other witnesses prior to the trial, a good argument to document for a possible appeal. \nNothing said in the trial hit me harder than the testimony of the surviving assault victim. He was more enraged than anyone in the courtroom. He described the pain in his chest he felt as the knife pierced his flesh. How he felt he was going to die when he was lying in the hospital with a punctured lung. Then he pulled up his shirt, and showed the wound to the courtroom. That was it for me. I felt that little tingle creep up and down my spine about 20 times in that one second he peeled off the bandage.\nWhen the session ended that day and I walked out of the courthouse, it took a minute for me to recover. I just stood there, feeling the hot breeze of a summer afternoon whipping my face. I looked at the grass and the trees and the squirrel running across the lawn. I felt like I wanted to cry and scream and throw up all at the same time.\nThis was real life. Real pain. The real stuff at the heart of the justice system. It wasn't glamorous or sexy. There were no commercial breaks. Someone was dead. In a matter of weeks, the man that sat just feet away could be thrown into prison for the rest of his life.\nThis was not an episode that ended with credits.