Our focus shifts towards Macayla Belt, a junior graduating in May 2021. Macayla is from Rochester, New York and majoring in Criminal Justice Management. On-campus, Macayla is President of the Law Club, Secretary of the Arts and Culture Club, a member of the women’s field hockey team and a junior representative for the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. Outside of school, Macayla enjoys skiing, hanging with her friends, and going to concerts. A fun fact about Macayla is she has two other siblings!
Macayla interns with the Framingham Juvenile Court in the Clerk’s Office. In her role, she enters new cases into the database, appoints counsel to juveniles, accommodates incoming warrants and arraignment intakes, aides the clerk in the courtroom with trials, hearings, and arraignments, and makes sure the case dockets are accurate. A typical day for Macayla begins sitting in on probable cause hearings with the Clerk. These hearings decide if juveniles will have a case and an arraignment, or if the matter will be settled outside of the courtroom. Once the hearings are complete, Macayla inputs new cases into the database system and sends out notices to all parties, letting them know what day their hearing will take place. After the morning paperwork is finished, she goes into the courtroom and observes the cases for the day. Once the court session is over, she takes the files and looks up each case to make sure it was docketed correctly and that the physical docket matches what was entered into the computer system. At the end of the day, she prints out the cases to be heard for the next day, assigns them a number and pulls all of the files for the Clerk.
When asked about Macayla’s favorite part of her position, she said it is when she gets to sit in on the probable cause hearings because she likes seeing the different approaches. She also mentioned she thinks this is particularly interesting because the juveniles talk more than they do in the actual courtroom and she enjoys hearing what they have to say.
Macayla’s advice to others is, “to take whatever opportunity comes your way because even if it isn’t what you think you would like; you could end up loving it”. At first, Macayla was only interested in interning with a law firm, not a court-related job. When she received this opportunity she ended up gaining so much from the experience.
The CPDC Team would like to congratulate Macayla on her accomplishments and wish her luck with her future career.
