Witness to justice

Seventh grade had a once-in-a-lifetime experience today, witnessing two hearings at Rhode Island US District Court with time to debrief with the judge in between.
 

Alumni parent Judge Jack McConnell welcomes Gordon’s seventh grade into his courtroom each year.
 

The trip is part of the students’ study of the US Constitution. At this point in the year, they’ve pulled apart the first three articles of the Constitution and the first amendment, with an emphasis on the checks and balances built into the system.
 

Meeting with students, Judge McConnell was able to talk about his own role in upholding the separation of powers, and the challenges of supporting the rule of law in the current media environment.
 

Students saw two hearings today in which defendants re-entered their pleas as guilty: an arson case in which a North Providence church had been destroyed, and a complex bank fraud case that involved victims in multiple states.
 

Plea re-entries might not sound like the high drama of a Law and Order episode, but students were transfixed. 
 

The hearings included a complex dissection of the two very different cases, and students got to hear Judge McConnell review in detail each defendant’s rights: their right to counsel, to remain silent, to plead innocent or guilty, all rights they had gone over in class in the past few weeks.
 

And, more importantly, Judge McConnell had been able to contexturalize the hearings for students with kindness and compassion, and help them understand how even these technical-sounding hearings had the power to change the defendants’ lives, and those of the victims.
 

Between the details of the crimes, the experience of seeing Judge McConnell at work, and the sight of the Constitution coming alive in a courtroom, there was a lot for students to unpack. When the students gathered back on campus to process, step one was to talk through the sadness, anxiety, empathy, compassion, hurt and uncertainty they witnessed - and that they felt.
 

As one student said today, “You’re used to hearing about things like this on the news, but then you walk into the room, and the people involved are sitting there in front of you, suddenly it all looks different.”

Gordon’s seventh grade humanities class, and the eighth grade curriculum that follows next year, is a perfect place for this conversation to continue.

 

More photos from today 

More lessons from this year on democracy, dissent and decisionmaking