The first three days

Day 1: In the office. My day consisted of talking to my boss and the other people in the office and reading cases from the previous week's Dawson County grand jury. Most of the cases were a group of kids just barely adults for criminal purposes who decided to steal shit from houses for no apparent reason. Awesome. This is why I'd have a hard time defending people. I have no patience for stupid.

Day 2: Docket in Garza County. Docket in each county occurs, I think, only once or twice a month. For the felony docket for this county, we were finished by noon. To give some perspective for non-criminal law people, it took a daily docket to do that in Harris County. Nothing too exciting in court, but we did go to a tasty restaurant for lunch. I am becoming a fan of small towns because they have tasty, reasonably priced hole in the wall restaurants. :)

Day 3: Docket in Dawson County. Dawson and Gaines have the biggest dockets among the four counties in the 106th. We actually had to come back in the afternoon to finish up a few people's cases. The last was the best of the day. The defendant was originally convicted in about 2004. She's since screwed up several more times and been kicked out of various TDCJ programs. Her diatribe about how none of it is her fault was hilarious. She just kept going and going for somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes. Whenever the judge tried to focus her talking to what the judge was actually asking about, the defendant didn't let it stop her. The whining continued. And continued. Among other things, she talked about how in prison she'd gotten "a drug education, and a lesbian education." Can't say I knew they offered those classes in TDCJ.

In other news, I was sworn in by the judge today. She invited members of the Lamesa bar, so I met several attorneys who practice no criminal law. The thing I found most interesting is that, aside from the judge, I'm apparently the only female attorney in Lamesa. Crazy. But I'm a real attorney now, pending receipt by the bar of my prorated attorney tax. I owed them just under $100 because there was a month or so gap between when I was eligible to join the state bar and when I got my job, which (as a government attorney) made me exempt from the tax. I think that mostly sums up the past few days. Here's hoping tomorrow's docket in Gaines is just as much fun.

Random fact of the day: the 106th judicial district is divided between two appellate courts. Lynn and Garza Counties go to Amarillo and Dawson and Gaines go to Eastland. I find this entertaining because it means the same judge's cases may be appealled to two different courts. Oh, Texas.