Hawken Project Preview


Hi. My name is Khalil Suggs. I am a 13-year Hawken student, currently a senior, who is attending the University of Miami in the fall. For my 2022 Hawken Project, I decided to make my real-world experience a possible job in my future. In the 1990s, my mother was a prosecutor in New York City. Her hard work and genuine passion for making the world a better place have inspired me to take the lawyer route. Before I start the Pre-Law track in the fall, I chose to start my journey a bit sooner. With the connections to the Cuyahoga County Justice Center I fortunately have, I was able to set up a schedule where I am shadowing different prosecutors around the building. Whether it was seeing the work my mother did or just watching Law and Order with my brother, I have always been interested in law. With this project, I am doing something that gives me real-life experience, and an opportunity to see what my life would be like as a Cuyahoga County prosecutor. During the next couple of weeks, I will be shadowing prosecutors from different units who work on different floors and try different cases from different places in the county. I will be learning from the ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) unit, the major trial/homicide unit, and many more units and how they go about trying their specific crime. Because I am shadowing prosecutors, I will be able to enter courtrooms and listen to different pleas, trials, sentencings, etc. This will show me the reality of trial life and how it is different from what we see on TV shows. Another opportunity being in courtrooms will give me is to see how judges operate. There are 34 judges with 34 different personalities on the bench in the county. I will be traveling to different floors with different courtrooms to show me how judges can be different so you will have to understand the length of a sentence or the type of punishment they give may vary. At the end of this project, I am hoping that I will have a good insight into how the justice system works in one of the biggest counties in Ohio. The project will also help me learn which type of law I want to practice and which cases I will want to try, hopefully laying the foundation for my future.

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