I just finished watching an episode of Law and Order, and before each stage of the trial they have a small subtitle informing us which “part” of the trial it is.
For example, in tonight’s episode, at the end just before the jury gave its verdict, the heading said:
Supreme Court
Trial Part 62
What i want to know is whether this is just a convenient way to split each trial up into sessions, with each “part” simply being a consecutive numer, or does each specific aspect of the trial have its own “part” number?
I’m quite a Law and Order fan, and i seem to recall the number 49, for example, coming up quite often.
I dunno if this is it, since the parts are lettered, not numbered. It appears to be a breakdown of the different processes involved during a trial. Each one is a “part”.
Oddly, a “trial part” has nothing to do with a part of the trial, but has to do with the division of the court. Most other trial benches uses a word like “court” or “panel” for what New York State calls a “part.” For example, the judges who deal with matrimonial cases sit on the Matrimonial Trial Part, and other judges sit on the General Trial Part, and so forth. The Trial Parts are simply those judges who are assigned to hear cases at trial. Trial Part 49 is one such division to which a judge is assigned and, at least for a while, Trial Part 49 is probably presided over by the same judge day after day, until that judge is reassigned to other duties and a new judge takes over in Trial Part 49.
I think brianmelendez has it correct. I have a case pending right now in the “city part” which is for cases against New York City.
Although it’s not directly asked in the OP, I would add that in New York, the Supreme Court is the court of general jurisdiction – what is referred to as “superior court” in most states. In New York, the high court is known as the Court of Appeals.
Try a parallel – a single university may have two or more different campuses in different areas of a city or even in different cities, but with a single administration over it. You graduate from Cecil Adams University, not from the Cecil Adams University campus in Baltimore or the one in Chicago.
In the same way, the courts of general jurisdiction in many (I believe most) states are conceived of as a single entity, with a bench made up of many judges, who may sit individually or in small panels to hear cases separately, but who render decisions in the name of the single court of which they are a part.