Thomas and Nick's Excellent Adventure

On Tuesday afternoon, Nick and I were intrepid reporters. We were men. Plowing down 275 to the courthouse, confidence was all we knew. Our certainty of hitting our target was nearly guaranteed. Surely, there must be a trial going on.

After wandering the labyrinth of courtrooms, payment queues and information desks we got some help. A kind, elderly woman with an adorable smile broke our spirit. Her name was Bryce.

"I wish someone would tell your professor that these things happen in the morning. And they start on Wednesdays, the first two days are jury selection," she said, wishing us luck in our now titanic quest to find felony courtroom 51A.

Spiritually castrated, we trudged on. No longer reporters. No longer feeling entitled. We went up and down the same stairs and elevators we had so confidently ascended (or descended) before.

Perhaps as a spiteful premonition of the futility of it all, Nick found an elevator that took us to a floor with no lights, only haunting shadows cast by the nearby shaded window. It opened to a small lobby, with locked glass doors, leading to somewhere obviously condemned. We quickly retreated.

Finally, we found courtroom 51A. It was locked. Our goal denied to us, we trudged back to the main information desk to locate some traffic courts, what was initially promised as a surefire solution. While I waited in the wrong line, Nick scored a hot tip. Courtroom 9. Also, our classmates found us and tagged along, missing out on our excellent adventure.

Our sanctuary was at the farthest reaches of the annex at the end of the building - seriously, if it had stretched anymore it would have definitely severed itself from the main Courthouse. Then the evil beast would have begun replicating like the spiteful bacterium it is, thereby consuming Tampa in a sea of inaccessibility.

***

Judge Margaret Taylor Courtney, half-bored and half-annoyed, was repeating herself for the umpteenth time to a man who clearly spoke only Spanish and did not even seem to understand his translator very well. She mockingly asked him over and over if he knew he was driving with a suspended license in this "great state of ours." He shouted "guilty", clearly panicked, and was answered with polite laughter.

The judge called three people up at a time, most pleading no contest, some being dismissed because the cited officer wrote the wrong statute on the ticket, with three ultimately headed off to jail. They came up and went faster than I could write their names and citations down. A fine of $1,000 was allotted to each of the individuals who did not show for their court date.

One man, about our age, was going to spend 10 days in jail. Certainly he would lose his job, he claimed. After waiting in handcuffs on the side for a couple minutes while the room cleared, he plead out and promised to buy a phone line for his apartment so he could be put on house arrest for 30 days.

Another man had a comically large list of tickets: 23 in Dade, 1 in Collier, 1 in Columbia and 7 more outside Hillsborough, as well as a long list of those within the county. Judge Courtney seemed to enjoy reading the list and insisted he be quiet while she counted them off. Counter-intuitively, she assured him that he could get his license back after he paid them all. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 12 months of probation.

The judge seemed to know, and we did too, that he would be back. They would get the blood that he owed. If he paid his tickets and behaved, then the courts won. If he did not, then he would be behind bars and they still won.