After eight weeks of trial, the days in the courtroom had begun to blur into one another, like the countryside seen from a train window. A shaft of spring sunlight would find its way into the court and strike the brass lamp on the judge’s bench, a flash of brilliant yellow in the cavernous, gray, dismal room. The fluorescent lights overhead made everyone appear pale and sickly. Thick volumes of legal papers had grown on the counsel tables and more thick volumes lay underfoot in cardboard boxes on the floor. The lawyers’ overcoats, damp from a morning rain and smelling of wool, hung over the gallery railing. The radiators hissed gently. Distant, muted sounds of city traffic, a siren, an unmufflered truck, would float up into the courtroom from the streets fifteen stories below. The atmosphere felt heavy and dense. One of the alternate jurors regularly fell asleep. On particularly dull days, such as the one when Schlichtmann read Grace’s answers to interrogatories into evidence, Judge Skinner himself seemed to doze at the bench, the flesh of his cheeks slack and his mouth slightly parted, his head rolling back onto his chair.

Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action, loc. 1901