a trip to the sub court

Reaching the Subordinate Courts, we soon learned that there was the trial in Court 26 for the recent murder of opposition party member, Tan Lead Shake’s brother and the slashing of Tan’s sister-in-law. The news had reported that Tan was suspected to have called to police to arrest his wife after she had committed the murder and stabbing.
Upon entering Court 26, there were a string of mentions concerning various cases, most of which were either put on police bail or was postponed to a later date due to the need for further investigations. I had expected a full blown trial for this murder case, considering the interest that has been generated and the people involved. However, the hearing was postponed to 7 July pending investigations. What I had managed to gather was that the name of Tan’s wife was Wu Yun Yun and that she was charged with the suspected murder of Tan’s brother.
Seeing as how the rest of the court cases were mentions, we decided to try Courts 1 to 4 at Level 7. However, most of the courts had present only lawyers and people seated at the public gallery, but no judge. We tried the courts on Level 5 as well, but it was the same. Finally, we decided to try asking for the Charge Sheet, hoping that in so doing, we could get details about potential cases and perhaps even the time the cases were going to start. If we ran out of time to sit through the entire court case, at least the details would be sufficient to write a report. We then went back to Court 2 and asked the court office if we could obtain a copy of the Charge Sheet. They directed us to the Corporate Offices who later told us we could not get a copy as we were not licensed journalists and did have the necessary paperwork.
Considering that this was the second time we were in the Subordinate Courts to get a story, I honestly thought we would be more equipped. This time, I knew from experience to expect that there would be a lot of waiting. The last time, we waited one and a half hours for a case that got postponed, and then sat through another two cases for approximately half an hour. I was prepared for mentions of section numbers and abbreviations that I did not understand and for soft spoken judges who spoke fast. That time however, we could afford the luxury of time to get a proper story. Now however, we only had effectively half an hour to get a story. Even with the printed hearing list, we somehow chose all the wrong courts. We chose the courts based on the description of the case – Court 2 had cases concerning “causing grievous hurt, outrage of modesty, misuse of drugs, theft” and Court 4 had “theft and robbery”. We thought those were big ticket stories. We checked the top 2 levels and only Court 26 on the first level and left out the courts in between.
I think the issue was limited persistence. I was really disappointed we did not get a story. If journalism were to be my career, I knew not being able to get a story was not an answer. We should have gone through all the levels and checked the rest of the courts, even if the charge or case did not seem as interesting or that big a deal. Experience might have gotten the better of us, we thought we knew how to handle and what to expect, but then forgot the basics of simple persistence.