Second-weeker
Thursday 1 May 2025
The Remainder
article
SECOND-WEEKER. We were given a case that afternoon, in the heat of mid-April. The sun was shining and the second-weekers were everywhere. It was the morning of possible options, possible routes, and I was exploring the limits of the map on my phone. There was the sun, and its representation on my home-screen. There was the blue line and the blue dot and the red dot and that was you. This is the language of our time, an old-new kind of technical vocabulary. You were the one sitting early at the desk, thick-rimmed and bluetoothed; the neat one slouched lengthways on the deep couch; you were handing over papers and passports, scared a little for what they might mean or set in motion. I was the dead-end blue dot and you had all arrived. You were upstanding, smiling and making friends for the next five minutes.
The language of the courthouse is gold-leaf and plain oak, a plastic-laminate notice reading: PLEASE DO NOT MOVE THE FURNITURE. This is the texture of the briefing, of the space in which it happens – chandeliers with the wiring exposed – a moody kind of material decline. We speak of long-term and short-term and how both are in evidence, in a room like this. We speak of a ‘wipe clean mindset.’
There was a path from the station to the court, and then there were alternative paths, some of which led nowhere. And in my in-between time I decided I would test them: to cross-examine the blossom of the streets behind the hospital, the vintage cars parked up outside the council estates, the queues of late commuters lining the delis and coffee shops. This is the kind of blue sky thinking made available by time outside of work and waiting; a freedom of – and from – judgement.
This is the first-day outlook, anyway. The woman in the room – the one who is not us – shouting: “YOU’RE WHAT WE CALL FIRST-WEEKERS”; and me thinking it is nice to have a name and a measurable sense of progress. Our responsibilities are to sit patiently, take on new cases, arrive early to court and file reimbursement forms on our second day of service. There would be papers distributed, information-films screened, and tannoy-systems calling names we do not yet recognise.
We are taught the codewords we’d later rely on – the commands for a corridor line-up, the left-right-down journey to the courtroom itself, the four-digit pin for the jury waiting area. And all the way through her briefing the second-weekers would creak the door open, and the woman would say: “I’M TELLING YOU NOW, THAT’LL BE YOU NEXT WEEK.” Our mistakes play out in front of us, ahead of us, and we are reproved in advance.
The second-weekers are the other plainclothes people, the ones who wear Fred Perry and Levis, comfortable footwear and tote-bags, but who – importantly – are not us. They are not us in a different way than the general public, who wear dark grey dresses and puffy-red eyes. They are us, quite simply, a week from now.
I would walk via the market, via the hospital and the park, via the river and the bookshop. I would turn my phone off and idle, I would see things differently without it. There is pollen in the air and in the stuff of the waiting room. The second-weekers would sneeze and bless one another by name. I would edge closer and feel myself fall out of place, out of phase – an old-new kind of self in the works. There is a risk inherent in any experiment, I suppose. An inevitable kind of risk.
There are signs in the rooms that tell us not to discuss what is heard, what is seen, until the time is right, until the second week.
We would learn of the defendant, the defence, the prosecution, the witnesses and ushers, judges and magistrates and us, the jury. Of how the room compartmentalises these terms on our behalf: the dock, the bench, the stand, the box. A separation of concerns. I would sit on a chair with a number, in a room with a number, and there would be labels attached to documents that are numbered as well. And we would be invited to think of their language as impartial, a subset of English which ensures our safety. Of language itself as a safe of sorts.
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Towards the end of the c10th the King of England, Æthelred II (otherwise known as Æthelred the Unready), issued the Wantage Code, a document which aimed to clarify legal procedures and the management of disputes within the ‘Danelaw’ (now the East Midlands). The code’s issuance came at a time of conflict, where renewed Danish incursions into the ‘Five Boroughs’ – Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Stamford – threatened a tentative peace with the descendants of earlier viking settlers. In this document Æthelred outlined what is commonly thought to be the earliest extant evidence of an English jury system:
§1. And a court shall be held in every wapentake, and the twelve leading thegns along with the reeve shall go out and swear on the relics which are given into their hands, that they will not accuse any innocent man or shield any guilty one.1
What is being described here is a ‘jury of presentment’, where twelve ‘thegns’ – or local landholders – would investigate crimes on the basis of local knowledge and community consensus. Rather than hearing cases based on formal witness testimony, officials would play an active role in ‘presenting’ accusations.
These noblemen would walk the streets looking for clues, gathering rumors, relying on their familiarity with local affairs to determine who might be responsible for a given crime. This approach marked a departure from the more reactive and compensation-focused legal traditions of earlier Anglo-Saxon law – it introduced a more investigative and communal mode of justice, one that would later evolve into the formalized jury systems of medieval and modern England.
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[For Marx and Engels], one function of the prison in capitalist society is to stabilize commerce. More broadly, of course, prison was one part of the overall bourgeois legal system of punishment based upon a false guise of liberty.
For instance, commenting on a case in which several leaders of a Workers’ Association in Cologne were on trial, it is noted, first, they were imprisoned and treated like low level criminals. Secondly, they could not expect a fair trial because, “we regard the jury system as at present organized as anything but a guarantee. The register qualification gives a definite class the privilege of choosing the jury from its midst”. Jury members generally came from privileged class positions and, [as Marx and Engels write], “the ‘conscience’ of the privileged is precisely a privileged conscience”.2
*
The letter arrives in the post and asks that you participate. It is small and brown and bears a coat of arms unlike those you have received from other government departments. The weather is grey and cool, and there it is on the mat. It bears the word: SUMMONS.
Now you’re in the room and you’re examining circumstantial evidence. Evidence that must itself be interrogated, and from which inferences must be drawn. A verdict. There are papers spread across tables, images and films stored on thumb-drives. There are the notes you have taken alongside the notes of others. These are the materials in question; the things which are not yet facts. The space is small and hot and you remain unconvinced. There is a sense that the room is moving in a direction of which you are uncertain.
You have been walking through evidence for two days. Two days of leafing, eating, talking, pissing, note-taking, gesturing, sneezing, in synchronisation with eleven others. There are habits you have developed. Community knowledge. There is the coffee at one-o’clock. There is the request for a smoke-break. There is the air-conditioner and the dehumidifier, both too loud to speak over. There are disclosures – names spoken, claims to reputability, risks taken.
You have walked every path here by now. You have taken this work seriously: the blue sky counting, the noting, walking, memorisation of every face lining the streets, the coffee orders and timings of lights, trains, buses. These are the things over which you have control – the path to the building, to the blue-dot. It is a privilege to walk the streets, is it not?
There are the things you cannot say beyond the room, and the things you can. There are the words you have had to learn and become comfortable with. Words which enter and change you in ways that are surprising, even to those who have known you for such a short time. To those who you have known for only two weeks.
This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout