On the beaten path

Paranoia at the State Office of Court Administration has eliminated all that. Now you must go through a metal detector, place items on a conveyor belt for scanning, and answer questions about where you’re going and why.
Courthouse personnel and some attorneys don’t go through the inquisition, which makes the whole thing useless anyway.
By now I've learned what will set the metal detector off, like the spiral wire holding my reporter's notepad together. I try to bring a miniature legal pad with no wire instead.
If I'm covering a trial, I take a paperback book. Recesses of half an hour to go get something are not uncommon.
In Essex County, the court staff is professional and polite, and they know who I am, so I don’t usually have to explain why I’m headed to a courtroom.
In Washington County, court officers weren’t going to let me in unless I told them exactly why I wanted to attend a public trial. Good thing I was there early.
Then you get to the courtroom, which isn’t unlocked until minutes before court begins. You sit in a waiting area outside, sometimes with the defendant and his or her family, who will often ask you to keep this out of the paper if they know who you are.
Finally, court begins. In Essex County, the front row in the courtroom is reserved for press, lawyers and law enforcement. So I at least don’t have the defendant’s supporters trying to read my notes, as happened at one proceeding before they started reserving the front row.
Following the court appearance, you have to chase prosecutors and defense lawyers out of the courtroom to get more information, or ask for a comment if it’s a really important case.
Then you need to rush back to the office to write the story, which is often slated to go immediately on the Web as breaking news.
Since the Essex County Courthouse is a distance from my office at the Port Henry bureau, I usually try to find some place in Elizabethtown to write and file the story.
It’s only when I see the message on my laptop screen that the Press-Republican’s computer network has accepted the story that I can relax.