as someone who loves legal whump but is totally clueless on legal procedure, do you have any info you could share for writing it accurately (or some things i would never know to include)?
OH GOSH let me think about that i would be so happy to share
so for a few disclaimers, obviously, i practice in a particular jurisdiction, with particular practice directions and customs. i am a criminal defence attorney but i am by no means an expert. these are just things i think about a lot. also, in the tradition of lawyers everywhere, nothing here is legal advice (tho idk how anyone could even think it was lmao), and this is all hypothetical for fiction purposes.
the primary like, focal point of legal whump for me is in the dehumanization of the legal process and in retraumatization. this goes for if the whumpee is accused/charged or if they're the victim or if they're proceeding through a civil court process for like a restraining order or family court issue or civil suit. it's humiliating and horrible and any time you end up in a situation of cross-examination you're put on the spot to be vigorously challenged and, depending on the approach of the lawyer, bullied about what you say happened to you and the exact details.
some specifics under the cut that might be inspirational/helpful. i am always happy to chat about this sort of stuff with people, answer what questions i can, and generally put my legal education and professional experience to use for evil :)
everyone is talking in jargon they don't understand and not stopping to slow down and explain. everything about this process is terrifying but most of the professionals around them can lose sight of that pretty easily - this is after all just tuesday for them.
they're being forced to talk about what happened to them over and over again in a sterile and hostile environment. police statements. depositions. interviews with their lawyer, practice depositions. testifying on stand. cross-examination on the stand. how specific it all has to be. there's no dancing around any of it, no euphemisms, no 'i don't want to talk about that'.
cross-examination deserves to be a bullet point all on its own. there are rules (depending on jurisdiction obvs) about what you are and aren't allowed to ask people on cross, especially when the witness is a complainant (alleged victim) of particular types of crime. those rules are OFTEN not followed and there's often a lot of quibbling and wiggle room. however bad you think it can be on cross, it's worse. it can get brutal. you would not believe some of the things i have heard lawyers say to witnesses on cross. if you misspeak it's used against you. if you get upset it's used against you. you're under a microscope talking about some of the worst things that ever happened to you or trying to defend or explain yourself. everything you say is fair game. everything about you is fair game, to a point. (and even past that point, often enough. again, the rules don't protect people. they do... sometimes. sort of. but not enough, and there is always a way to try it anyway.)
affidavits are an underutilized avenue for this when discussing legal whump imo. the affidavit is where you write out what your evidence is, and it's a type of evidence used in many court proceedings. seeing it all laid out in such a strange way, in print on paper, formatted to fit court standards, is surreal. they'd have to write it themself or work with a lawyer to get the information together to write it and get all the info down. they'll have to review it. they'll have to read those words over and over again, see the language used, the way it's all put together.
the court process drags on for a long, long fucking time. that's the thing i think people understand the least about the general thing. even getting TO a trial is a matter of months or even more than a year, sometimes years plural. i don't mind this so much as a realism thing bc that's like, tedious to write about sometimes haha, but i think it could be an interesting thing to explore whump wise. like now you have to wait so long as this drags out farther and farther. there's an appearance or a hearing every so often. a motion.
the way that other people get pulled into it. their friends and family members needing to testify. needing to write affidavits of their own. be cross-examined. the lawyers will pick apart so many parts of their life, and their own lawyers will have to do that, too. you have to tell your lawyer SO much and you're often not given much time at all to get comfortable with them beforehand. i will have met someone a couple of minutes ago and then be asking them to tell me about some of the most traumatic parts of their lives. i don't have TIME to be as careful and sensitive as i'd like to be, and i try to emphasize as much as i can when talking to people that i know this is hard and i know it's embarrassing and i am in no way judging them, but that doesn't make it easy and a lot of people don't take that time.
there's also how... public so much of it is. stuff can be restricted access or limited as to what can be published or reported on, but there's still a sense in the courts i've been in that there are so many people around watching. other people in court. the court staff. members of the public, often. my court had a high profile criminal trial recently and they had a whole separate court room set up just as an overflow observation room where they set up feeds to the primary court room. imagine them having to see the articles published, the speculation online. if their identity is public, being mobbed by journalists coming to and leaving court. in this day and age we get live twitter feeds sometimes during trials of journalists updating moment to moment what's happening and being said.
yeah. i have a lot to say about legal whump and how traumatizing the legal process is, how dehumanizing, and how it's often RE-TRAUMATIZING for all involved. i often think about wanting to write fic that's all like - epistolary documents. affidavits, court filings, trial transcripts, etc. most whump doesn't get into like, practical consequences of what would happen if whumper was arrested and went to trial in a contemporary setting, or whatever the equivalent is, or what could happen if whumpee ended up charged with something or otherwise was involved in a court process of any kind, and it's some pretty rich territory imo.
in a nutshell, it's fucking horrible. it's awful, and endless, and emotionally violent in a way that's hard to describe. as a professional, it's one of the hardest parts of my job, seeing what that does to people and making sure that i stay alive to that and aware of it and do what i can to validate and mitigate that whenever possible. as a writer however and a whump writer? hot dog it's a smorgasbord of options and opportunity that's little explored for how genuinely terrible and traumatizing it can be.
