Name: Prisha Mitra Thakur
Class Year: 2027
Major: Political Science
Minor: Classics

Internship Organization: Monmouth County Superior Courthouse
Internship Title: Judicial Fellow
Location: Freehold, NJ

What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!

Every day at the courthouse is new and different from the last. Some days the judge carries a heavy calendar that leads to most if not the entire day being filled with court proceedings like oral arguments, plea agreements, and sentencing. Other days can be slower, with less actual court proceedings and instead more research and paperwork to do. My role mainly consists of helping and assisting the judge and her judicial clerk. I had the opportunity to work on legal research, judicial statements, and assisting in reviewing and writing motions for the court.

Why did you apply for this internship?

I plan on going to law school in the future and hope to practice law. I am especially interested in criminal law so I believed this internship would give me a really great exposure to the court side of a criminal issue. I also get to see how different actors like the attorneys, the probation officer, the translators, the court reporter, and the judge  all play a part in executing a person’s case. Overall, working under a judge directly is a great opportunity to get exposed to the legal world before law school.

Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?

The skills I am developing the most through this experience have been my legal writing and reading skills. My responsibilities include lots of reading of different cases, studies, exhibits, and police reports depending on the kind of assignment.  When I assist in writing judicial statements or memos, I gain that experience and develop the skill of legal writing and reading because of the police reports that I read through and take notes from. These skills are particularly important to me for my future because I am going into law and will be required to review and write legal documents to submit to the court in the future. I also gained an understanding of how legal writing can be very different from regular writing, requiring the writer to be direct and write specifically the facts without flowery language. While there is not a lot of creativity involved in legal writing, the work itself is so impactful and rewarding.

What is most rewarding about your internship?

There are a number of rewarding parts of my work under the judge especially because it directly affects real people. When the judge asks to research something, I get to gather the information that the judge will be referring to when making a determination for a decision that can be crucial to someone’s case. A specific example of this was when I was told to research about evidence coming from facial recognition technology. The question more specifically was about whether facial recognition technology alone can be enough to meet probable cause in front of a grand jury. This kind of case is crucial because it can set the precedent of whether someone can be indicted solely based on facial recognition technology.

While it was a smaller scale crime, this kind of determination can be helpful in the future where a much more serious crime, like a homicide case, has similar evidence presented. I got to learn so much about the flaws of facial recognition technology and automation bias people can carry. I also learned about the lack of accuracy facial recognition technology can have when they are processing specifically people of color. I then got to send my research and discuss with the judge what I found, including the research on racial biases in facial recognition technology and citing other cases that dealt with a similar issue. The research I was doing felt very impactful to other people’s lives and made me feel rewarded for my work.