Inside, a messy marketplace opens every day where each crime has a price and every defense lawyer had better know it or be snookered. Defendants and prosecutors negotiate on the fly, arranging plea bargains or charges to be dropped with a kind of justice that could be and has been described as lawless in its informality and seems designed to serve the guilty best. Trials are exceedingly rare and only for less serious crimes. Unconditional dismissals of charges against defendants are reportedly equally rare. Felonies are bound over to the district courthouse a block away on Church Street. The building fills up during arraignments for motor vehicle tickets, misdemeanors and felonies. The lobby becomes a circus of humanity anchored by a few bail bondsmen, prosecutors walking briskly to and fro and defense lawyers conferring with clients in no more privacy than a dusty corner or a fat marble pillar. On Friday, a woman looking no older than eighteen was typical of many visitors in the clothing she deemed appropriate for court. She wore extremely short denim shorts, a white T-shirt with bare midriff, an even shorter denim jacket over that and a face filled in with more makeup than anyone needs before 7 PM. Many male defendants show up in T-shirts and jeans. They are eye-catching and distract from those dressed more properly for court. The daily fashion parade is considered an intractable assault on the decorum of the court.The marketplace forces principles to bend to practicalities for efficiency’s sake; or according to some, to save defendants the anguish of long drawn out procedures; or out of a cynicism born of long exposure to unreformed criminals who seem barely to understand their own rights, never mind anyone else’s. Cases can be disposed of quickly this way and some legal procedures are so little practiced, some clerks and prosecutors seem to feign ignorance of what they are.The clerk’s office at GA 23 has more than its share of surliness, smirks and dispensing of inaccurate information and who knows in what distant past the office mistakenly began to operate under the belief it is an annex of the state’s attorney’s office. Some, not all, of the clerks there push paper and people around with prosecutorial zeal. In the press of daily work or maybe out of the same cynicism, the highest ideals of the office seem relegated to nominal status. In this morass, a prosecutor can feel good getting a violent offender, guns and drugs off the street and best stays focused on that. A strong argument could be made that the culture of GA 23 makes access to formal justice more difficult than access by the public and the press to documents and hearings there. Another, probably futile, argument could be made that access to justice is wholly unrelated to press access. But a police report missing from a file in GA 23 is often just as unavailable to the defendant in the case as it is to a reporter. Entering the front door into the main lobby with its pale marble tones, a brilliant red sign stands out, clear across the lobby on the opposite wall outside main Courtroom A, (and again outside Courtroom B, tucked into a side nook.) It is engraved in white letters with the rules of the courthouse, one through seven. Close-up of sign Jane Mills photo.Until June 27, when New Haven Superior Court Chief Administrative Judge Linda K. Lager ordered the clerk’s office to cover it up, rule number four banned writing in the courtrooms. The rule was stickier than chewing gum, banned under rule number three. Lager gave permission to take a photograph of the sign before it was altered, in the evening when the building is empty. Rule four read, “No reading, writing, standing or sleeping while court is in session,” in English and Spanish. Lager, who took over as chief administrator in New Haven Superior Court in January and sits on the bench a block away in the courthouse on Church Street, said she had been meaning to take a tour of the GA courthouse but hadn’t yet. Learning of the sign, she walked over to see it for herself. She decided the rule was improper. “I wasn’t aware it was there,” she said afterward. “I think it is proper for people to be able to take notes or write in a courthouse. I told the clerk that [the rule] wasn’t proper and to cover it up,” she said. Lager said the aim of the rule may have been to discourage people from doing crossword puzzles and similar kinds of writing, but said “I don’t think it is anybody’s business what someone is writing.” Unlike a May incident when Superior Court Judge Wendy W. Susco ordered two news reporters to stop taking notes, no one interviewed was aware of any reporter complaining he or she had been forbidden to take notes in a hearing in New Haven. But there was a complaint. A January 30, 2006 Associated Press article by Matt Apuzzo reported that GA 23, Judicial Marshal Luther Cuffee prevented a member of the public from taking notes during hearings in the courthouse. Cuffee said in January that, “That’s the rules of the court,” the AP reported. He said the rule was set by New Haven Superior Court Judge Gerald F. Esposito. Esposito denied it. Judicial officials denied there was any policy banning note-taking, according to the AP report. Joseph D’Alesio, director of court operations statewide, said in January that the marshal apparently had misinterpreted a rule prohibiting reading, not writing. He went on to suggest that Cuffee may have heard it somewhere. “They hear things and, as stories get told, they could be changed slightly,” D’Alesio told the AP. But the rule Cuffee followed is posted right on the wall, on a roughly two by three foot sign. Close-up of sign Jane Mills photo.The January story contained no admission from any judicial official that the rule was engraved on a sign posted prominently in the building. The sign continued to hide in plain site until June 27, long after the AP reported that judicial officials had promised to put a stop to it. Breaking a rule of the court, as the AP noted, can cause a judge to hold a person in contempt and even to order jail time. Judge William J. Lavery, chief court administrator for the Connecticut Judicial Branch, said in response to the May incident in Susco’s courtroom that he knew of no policy in the courts banning note-taking, according to press reports. Lavery declined to be interviewed for this story. “I was not aware of it. I don’t know of any similar sign anywhere,” Connecticut Judge Trial Referee Aaron Ment said of the sign in New Haven. “Unless there is an exception for a particular case, reporters or anyone is allowed to take notes,” Ment said.Ment is a member of Supreme Court Justice David Borden’s Judicial Public Access Task Force. According to a court source in New Haven directly involved in the process, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, the presiding criminal judge in GA 23 in New Haven writes the rules of the court when he or she takes the reigns and the clerk’s office is responsible for ordering the sign made. A judge can hold the position of presiding judge for a year or more. Superior Court Judge John F. Blawie currently presides in GA 23 and will continue in 2007. It is unclear whether Blawie, a 2004 appointee of former Gov. John G. Rowland, could have been responsible for the sign. A requisition form, a fax sent to a sign shop, a record of payment of the bill for the sign, information as to who ordered the sign or who the presiding judge was at the time are all routine requests for administrative information discoverable under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, or otherwise available under the assumption of access to the courts dictated by common law and the First Amendment to the US Constitution. A request for the information has been pending with the judiciary since June 27. Posting rules of the court reportedly varies between judicial districts and the same sign was not distributed statewide. But a reliable answer can only be arrived at by visiting each of the state’s courthouses. A judicial marshal in GA 23 said two weeks ago that he thought the current sign was seven to nine years old, but Kathy Naumann, deputy chief clerk of Superior Court, the highest clerk in the GA courthouse, said on Friday the current version of the rules is only three to four years old. Asked which judge was presiding at the time this sign was ordered, she said she didn’t know and didn’t remember. She also said she didn’t know or remember if there was a requisition form and didn’t know or remember how she goes about requisitioning items for the court in general, when asked what the general procedure was. She then stopped the interview, walked away and said without explanation she was going to call the court’s external affairs department in Hartford, which is the court liaison to the press and public. The sign was practically invisible to the busy people who work there. Two senior New Haven prosecutors, dressed in sharp suits and pressed shirts, were drafted on Friday from their orbits to and fro to answer what word, now missing, used to be part of rule number four. Assistant state’s attorneys Joseph LaMotta and Jack Doyle stood there staring at the thing, uncharacteristically silent, uncharacteristically still, and stumped. “I’m not sure,” Doyle finally said. Touching it with his finger, he said “I think it might say no eating?” Told it had said no “writing,” Doyle said he thought the idea of it was to pay attention in court. “I don’t think they interpret it to prevent the press, or lawyers or defendants taking notes,” he said. Considering the context, alongside gum chewing, sleeping and eating, it seemed a reasonable conclusion, if problematic. Outside of the obvious crossword puzzle, how would a judge decide what note-taking was OK without asking a question about what someone is writing? Joan Leonard, supervisory assistant public defender in GA 23, whose office is on the ground floor, was unaware of the rule. She said she noticed the sign, but never the rule about writing. Leonard, the daughter of a newspaper publisher, grew up in a household engaged in the First Amendment battles her father waged on behalf of his paper in southern Illinois. Leonard said the rule presents an “obvious” First Amendment issue, even though she assumed it was aimed at people writing personal letters, doing crossword puzzles or reading the newspaper while court is in session, all disrespectful of the court, she said.Asked if, in response to a judge asking what someone is writing in order to determine whether the note-taking is acceptable, one could object that the First Amendment precludes the question, Leonard said someone “certainly could. It seems to me reporters taking notes or anybody taking notes can’t be banned.” Defense lawyer Miguel Rodriguez, found conferring with a client in the lobby on Friday, asked if the rule had applied to “the people or lawyers.” He supported distinctions between the kinds of writing and who was doing it. People “shouldn’t do it in the courtroom. The sanctity of the court requires that people should be attending to the proceedings,” he said. Rodriguez said reporters could step outside to write. Bail bondsman Arthur DiAdamo was one of those anchors in the lobby on Friday, standing near the sign and just outside the teeming traffic going to and from Courtroom A. “Why would I,” he said when asked if he had ever read the sign. “Let’s see,” he said perusing it. He also was unaware it had said “writing,” and said it seemed a small thing in light of more serious concerns about the rights of defendants facing charges. “Well you know the only people that should be in court are people who have cases. Don’t get me wrong, it is a public place, but if you let everyone write, let me tell you, they would be writing letters, doing homework, writing signs to each other,” he said. It was a small thing, he figured, when he considered his clients are coming to court from the jail house and seeking release on bond. He admitted he was cynical as someone who, after over 30 years working in GA 23, was now bondsman to the children and grandchildren of people he bonded out when he first began. The decorum might impress one of them, he said. “If no writing in court would save one of them,” he was for it, he said. Looking at the sign once more, he said of the white paint, “It’ll wear off.” In the interests of full disclosure, Jane MIlls fought and won an infraction ticket in this courthouse earlier this year. She has visited the courts here for nearly four years as a reporter.