Academy City General Courthouse

Academy City General Courthouse (学園都市汎用裁判所) is a courthouse located in Academy City's District 1.

Principles
Located in District 1, the Academy City General Courthouse is Academy City's, equipped to facilitate maximum speed trials, which can take place as little as a day after the initial arrests and charges.

Visitors to the building have to pass through a metal detector gate and a security check before they can enter via the main courthouse entrance. The gate emits a grid of far infrared beams which mess with a person's body heat to lead already unstable people into making mistakes, allowing for suspicious individuals to be more easily detected. A civilian application of an anti-sleep weapon, it only raises the body temperature by half a degree but the grid emission can stimulate individual organs to leave a person in an unstable state of mind.

There are several hallways leading off from the main lobby on the first floor, with the hallway to the left leading to the temporary evidence storage room around a corner. Several of the hallways have a lobby built into them for taking breaks and a bulletin board with a list of scheduled trials for the day.

Going by Court 103, the standard courtroom layout consists of several rows of gallery seats, accessed through a set of double doors and separated from the main court by a metal fence. The witness stand is located in the center with the prosecution seats on the left from the gallery perspective and the defense on the right. A wall behind the prosecution blocks off a box of frosted glass, which is for witnesses who wish to remain unidentified. The judges are seated along the back of the courtroom, with the presiding judge in the center, with two other professional judges and six lay judges. Every seat has a flat-screen monitor, with the lay judges' seats having more equipment. The gravestone-like box houses relay equipment which connects the lay judges' terminals to a giant supercomputer. As with other Japanese courts, there is no gavel, though the judge has a keyboard which produces the electronic sound of a wooden hammer.

The lay judges are chosen by lottery from the general public and participation is mandatory. As 80% of Academy City's population are students and minors, they can't necessarily make choices that could influence the rest of someone's life, and as such receive decision-making support from a specialized computer in order to help them carry out this civic duty. This learning machine contains the results of tens of thousands of previous trials and the past judgments are used to determine what to do with similar cases in the present. With the computer taught precedents in the same way as a spam filter, it presents a number for the years in prison or total fine on the screen like a phone's text prediction. The lay judges then judge whether the number seems too light or too heavy. The downside to this system is that the computer can't do anything when there is no precedent whatsoever.

Witnesses are usually brought in via the underground parking garage, accessed via a slope behind the courthouse. From there, they are escorted into the building through a small elevator and down a twisting and turning hallway to an area looking like a hotel or TV station waiting room. The long hallway is lined with doors, opened by card key, which lead into private waiting rooms. Witnesses must remain in these rooms until the trial. The rooms have snacks, drinks, an LCD TV, and a phone used for external contact and checking the identity of people outside the door. If they absolutely need to leave the room (e.g. to use the bathroom), the staff will construct a safe route for them to do so. Guards are not positioned outside the door so as not disclose which of the many doors has a witness behind it.

In order to prevent people from identifying which school they attend, witnesses wear a thick, black, full-body rubber suit and lay judges may wear black full-body tights.

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun: Cold Game
The courthouse was the site of Innai Chigiri's trial in connection to the Cold Sleep Murder Case.