Week 2: Rotations
Dain Y -
Hello!
This week I had many rotations to meet one-on-one with different employees in the Attorney’s Office. A full list of my meeting topics were:
- Charging
- Victim Notification
- Criminal Paralegal Unit
- Misdemeanors
- Felonies
- Coconino County Attorney’s Office Values
- Attorney’s Office’s Mission
Before I begin with giving a brief overview of what I learned, I thought it would be fitting to talk about the Office’s Values: Justice, Service, Trust, Integrity, Connection and Excellence. Hearing through the descriptions, each one seemed definitely essential for a successful law office, though, I was especially intrigued by the “Connection” aspect of how members of the office often go out and give presentations to the community as I also believe that education of the public is a very important goal and have been doing STEM Outreach for quite some time in high school.
Next, the usual, though not always applicable, steps of the criminal justice process are Initial Appearance, Grand Jury / Preliminary Hearing, Arraignment, Pre-trial Conference, Case Management Conference, Change of Plea, Trial Management Conference, Trial, then Sentencing (with possible Delays).
Going into the different roles in the criminal law division, when talking about Felonies and Misdemeanors, I found that the BASIS Capstone class I did in my senior year, History of Crime, gave me a great foundation for understanding the differences between the two. (To elaborate, Felonies are usually more serious than misdemeanors as they are misdemeanors with some form of aggravated assault, and misdemeanors are smaller offenses in comparison.) In terms of how they are prosecuted, I got to learn that the process of charging is similar for the most part; however, felonies require a longer time to carry out in court.
As for victim notification, I learned that though it may be expected for victims who are reporting a crime to provide information such as their phone number or house address, often times, such information is not available in the Prosecutor by Karpel (PbK) platform I previously mentioned, in which case the role of the victim notification legal assistant is to search up such information in an almost “detective”-like kind of way through search engines. Another thing that surprised me were how many. I was told that the magnitude in cases is not necessarily due to many new individuals committing crimes, but the same individuals committing nearly the same crimes all over again. This being due to the fact that even though an individual has committed a few crimes in the past, they were not incarcerated.
Finally, I was interested to find out that paralegals work closely with victims (almost like victim assistance services), but in a different way. For instance, if a witness needs specific arrangements for travel, lodging, and food in order to attend a court session, the paralegals arrange such services as well among other things that they do.
I have yet to meet with the court translator and focus on the linguistics aspect of my project as they are currently out of town, but I feel that I am greatly benefiting from the rotations and getting the honor and opportunity to meet with a lot of employees at this office.
Thanks for reading this week’s blog post!
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