I remember visiting a courthouse once on a school field trip and a judge telling us, after annoyedly referencing both Perry Mason and Judge Judy, that "the court is nothing like you see on tv." After day one in my two-week embed at Alameda County's Superior Court, part of a series on the courts funded through Spot.us, I have to say that's not entirely true.

Yes, most of the courthouse is surprisingly serene. The first floor is a little bustley with civilians milling about, waiting for their shot at jury duty. The rest of the building, including the court rooms, is pretty sparse. And at first glance, even the criminal jury trial rooms, like Department 8, Judge Vernon Nakahara's chambers, are quiet, smallish, and lightly populated. But as the day wore on over in the criminal trials division, rhetoric flared, demonstrations ensued, and the courtroom started to live up to its dramatic grandeur.

On the docket today, People v. Christopher Evans. In April, 2001, Evans shot and killed Tina Rose, 28, and Tommy Lee Brown, 41, in her hair salon at 85th & E. 14th in Oakland. Rose's brother had punched Evans in the head, moments earlier on the street, and a friend had handed Evans a gun. When Evans walked into the salon, waving the gun and apparently seeking revenge, Brown attempted to intervene. Evans shot him twice, then chased down Rose and shot her in the back of the head. This jury convicted Evans of a count each of first and second degree murder earlier this year. Now, they reconvened to discuss punishment--specifically, whether Evans will serve life without parole for his crimes, or be put to death.

Being on a jury in a criminal trial looks tough enough, but it's hard to imagine being pulled in off the street (missing work the whole while) to sit through a gruesome, emotional, months-long legal tug of war, not be able to talk to anyone (including fellow jurors, your spouse, and even your therapist) about it, and then be asked, after all that, to sign off on an appropriate punishment--namely, whether or not to put a person that you've been staring at and talking about for months, whose 13-year-old child you've heard beg for his life, and whose victims' families sit about 10 feet away from you, to death. The jury, 5 men and 7 women of various backgrounds, looked a little worn down.

The prosecutor, however, deputy District Attorney Michael Nieto seemed energized as he opened up the day's arguments. Nieto spoke for about an hour, imploring the jury to do what he said was the right thing and the difficult thing, to sentence Evans to death. Nieto said that Evans had shown Rose no mercy when she begged him not to shoot her, that Evans hadn't cared that Brown himself was a father when he took his life. Nieto flashed through pictures of the crime scene as he spoke, showing a particularly graphic panoramic of a blood-pooled hair salon and another photo, a close-up taken of Rose's face just after she died.

Nieto said that as time passes and initial revulsion abates, victims of a crime like this fade and become historical characters, while the sympathy the public feels for them morphs and transfers to the criminal himself, who now appears vulnerable and pitiable. Nieto said that pity for the defendant was misplaced, and that the jury should choose death.

Evan's lawyer, William DuBois (a prominent Oakland defense attorney who's represented many a high profile defendant, including software engineer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser), took over after lunch, and began by instructing the jury that while it's Nieto's job as a prosecutor to do so, he was trying to manipulate them into unnecessarily killing another human being. While Nieto had spent his allotted time trying to ease the jury's conscience by assuring them that the case against Evans was indisputable and the justification for death legally called-for, DuBois made it personal.

The government, DuBois said, is trying to "stone Chris Evans to death." The members of the jury could cast the first stone, could "vote to kill Chris" or could vote for life, he said. Evans' acts, Dubois said, were 26 seconds out of a then-27-year life, clouded by a concussion sustained when Rose's brother hit him in the head--Evans defense had (unsuccessfully) centered around the idea that he still does not remember the murders he committed in a post-concussion haze. DuBois flashed images from a security camera outside of Rose's salon. The pictures show Evans hit hard, and then staggering to stay upright for 40 seconds before entering the store with a gun. While Evans had taken Rose's and Brown's lives irrationally and spontaneously, DuBois told the jury, if they choose the death penalty, they will have taken a life deliberately, after discourse and rationalization and ultimately, unnecessarily.

In closing, DuBois referred to an 8.5 by 8.5 space he'd spent the last part of the lunch break measuring out. That's the size of the cell Chris Evans will spend the rest of his life in if the jury sentences him to life without parole, DuBois said. He'll get visits from his family at first, but they'll taper off. Two iron slats and an hour of yard time per day will be his only connections to the outside world, until the day when a guard finds he hasn't finished his meal tray, knocks on the cell door, and finds Evans dead inside.

"They'll put him in a body bag, take him out, and he'll be free," DuBois said. "And that is enough."

The jury went to deliberate with instructions from Judge Nakahara to weigh the aggravating and mitigating factors in the case for themselves. They're expected back within the week.

Though listening in turn to Nieto and then DuBois made the decision to first execute, and then not, seem obvious, it's clearly a ridiculously difficult and fraught task. Even Jessie Brown, mother of the Tommy Lee Brown, told me she didn't know if Evans should get the death penalty for killing her son. Brown sat in the second row on the prosecution's side of the courtroom, crying lightly for much of the afternoon. She said she'd been to every single day of the legal proceedings against Evans, save one.

"I just wanted him to be punished," she said. "That's all."