For the past six weeks, the person in the chair has been the former president of the United States. It is padded and made from weathered leather. The former president, who is also the presumptive Republican nominee in the next presidential election, .
He sits there for hours, leaning back, his eyes narrowed to slits, listening to . He is flanked by a team of lawyers. Behind him are .
Behind them, rows and rows of journalists sit for hours in hard, weathered wooden benches, shifting in their seats for a better look. But on this day, a Wednesday, the chair was filled with a succession of anxious New Yorkers who had admitted to their crimes. They were there to get help.
The jury in Donald Trump's hush-money trial, over a payment to , is known not to sit on Wednesday. While the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, is currently presiding over arguably the highest-profile criminal case in American history, he keeps the middle of his week clear for Manhattan's mental health court. It is a completely different world.
For Trump's trial, journalists and members of the public spend hours lining up outside the court, hoping to snag a seat in the courtroom or in a spillover room where they watch the proceedings on large TV screens. Hundreds are turned away. On the two recent Wednesdays at the mental health court, in the same 15th-floor courtroom during the trial's off days, a Business Insider reporter was the only journalist there.
But for these Wednesday defendants, the st.