BY MILES LAYTON
Chowan County Courthouse is back in session – $800,000 worth of renovations are complete.
The courthouse is around the corner from our home, so I paid Clerk of Superior Court Dwayne Goodwin a visit. Goodwin was instrumental in pursuing progress to transform the courthouse and its offices from 1970s chique to being more modern.
“This is a big improvement over the past, more convenient too,” Goodwin said. “Some of the attorneys who’ve worked here for years, they’ve seen how it was and how it flew and how it functioned. It’s going to be a lot better functionally.”
Let’s start the story like this – unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the courtroom before renovations which began in August of 2024, you wouldn’t know that the halls of justice looked like famed Brady Bunch architect Mike Brady designed it – gold/yellow carpet, fake wood paneling … long sigh…
And there was the smell, the locker room smell bleached into the courtroom over the years from thousands of people huddled into the pews to plead their cases – if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit or perhaps how there’s no need to stop because of “right on red” at a 4-way intersection downtown.
How about this for a statistic – one in four people living in Chowan County visit the courthouse each year on business.
“One in four – that’s a pretty close count of the citizens of the county will come to the courthouse for something, either for citation to be a witness in a crime to jury duty or for estates when someone passes away,” Goodwin said.
During each session, that courtroom was a crowded place where roughly 140 citizens, plus lawyers, defendants, plaintiffs and observers navigated their way through the court system where folks knew where to sit or not to sit, how to approach the bench, what not to wear, how to come and go from court after the judge bangs the gavel.
These days – that’s all different, so much better; “New car” smell, more like new courtroom smell because of improvements to the HVAC system. Courtroom is “airy” so lawyers and court personnel can move a little more freely when coming and going. When stepping into the forum, the floor is flat instead of having those annoying steps into the main area – in the past, sometimes folks would lose their footing when stepping down into that area, happened more than you think.
Computers have been wired such that court personnel and attorneys are on the same page – they can look at shared documents in real time – that’s a big leap forward.
“Everybody’s on the same page – all of us had to learn it at the same time which was another advantage I felt because the District Attorney was learning at the same time, the judge sometimes and attorneys,” Goodwin said. “It was all brand new and it kind of brought everybody in our district together because we all did have to work together and learn the system to make this thing work. But like I said, it takes more people to keep it running than what it used to because one person could fill out paper and, and move it right along. Now one person is finishing up that case while the next one is doing what they have to do.”
During the past several months, court was held at Evans Funeral Home – a session maybe held 200 folks waiting to get their cases heard. These days, that number is back down to 110 or so.
“Funeral home – if I could take that part of the building and set it in here, that would’ve been great because I could see 200 people with no problem,” Goodwin said. “When we’re in here in the new courtroom, we’re gonna be able to get about a hundred, 110 maybe. And where that comes into play is on court dates when you have 140 on the calendar, plus witnesses, plus law enforcement officers, plus attorneys. We’re gonna have a time trying to move people around.”
Goodwin continued, “But I’ve worked, I’m working hard with the DA’s office and the judges to try to, well we’re running an admin session at district court now, which means we can move a lot of these traffic cases a lot faster on one Tuesday a month. So we’re not clogging up the rest of the month with having to deal with those, but trying to reduce the court dates down to about a hundred people because I feel like that’s what we can kind of hold in here comfortably.”
Fewer folks means the court’s flow will go a little easier.
“We got a smaller group of people who have to be here,” Goodwin said. “Their cases have already been taken care of or continued, or they plead guilty, and they’ve moved on. Only ones that would be here at the end would be the ones that are tried, who are asking for jury trials.”
For folks who may have moved to Chowan County recently, Goodwin, 55, served as sheriff for many years before he was elected Clerk of Superior Court in 2022 – two years after retiring from a lifelong career in law enforcement.
As for public service and being the Clerk, “I’m enjoying it. It’s a lot to learn and we got a lot going on. I was kinda like a cage tiger when I retired. I was used to being sheriff and I was working seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I’d sit in the middle of, or sit up in the bed at night talking on the phone with somebody. And that’s their biggest problem in the world. And you know, you’re trying to help them. And then when I retired, it was boring because I found it hard to stop. You’re sitting there at breakfast and your biggest decision then becomes whether to have rice krispies or oatmeal for breakfast. And I was like, there’s gotta be something more and I want to keep serving the citizens of Chowan County. And that’s it, I came back to do that.”