The judge comes in first, triggering a ripple of expectation. You sense that something big is about to happen in this court of law — a capital case will be adjudicated here today.

The prosecutor and the defense attorney have had weeks, months, perhaps much longer, to do their homework. They’ve met several times with their clients, examined evidence, interviewed potential witnesses and prepared questions to ask them on the stand, questions that might, respectively, incriminate or exonerate the defendant.

Even the judge will be weary of saying or doing anything that might be constituted as sufficient cause for his ruling to be overturned on appeal by a higher court. A man’s life is, after all, on the line and judging whether this life (regardless of how worthlessly, dangerously or criminally the accused has lived it) should be snuffed out has wide ramifications for the whole concept of justice, a major building block of a civilized society. (If you want to argue that a civilized society does not sanction capital punishment in the first place, that’s another issue that I can take up with you via another column.)

To be sure, the verdict will be reached not by the judge, but by a jury of the defendant’s peers sitting in the jury box. They don’t know — no one can possibly know beforehand — how long the case will take to be adjudicated before they are instructed to go to the jury room to deliberate on the man’s fate, to convince themselves “ beyond any reasonable doubt” of whether he is innocent or guilty, whether he will live or die.

Indeed, even were he to be pronounced guilty, the defendant can still remain cheery, or cling on to his life for years afterward, knowing that court rulings have been known to be overturned, struck down, reversed by a higher court on appeal.

This is a column about political commentary, so why am I, you ask, seemingly proferring here a lesson — elementary and pedestrian, to boot — on the civics of the justice system?

Bear with me.

Several Western journalists (along with this columnist, though from afar, here in Washington) have followed the most recent court case in Baghdad where the death penalty was handed down last week to three men, a blacksmith, a builder and a laborer, accused of assassinating a senior intelligence official in the Interior Ministry, a crime allegedly committed by them on April 28 this year.

The trial, held by the 1st Iraqi Central Criminal Court, which convened in the former national museum where Saddam Hussein stacked his trophies and gifts from world leaders, lasted two hours.

Two hours! That’s how long it took the bench to sentence three men to death.

One of the Western journalists who attended the “trial” — and I’m putting the word in quotes in order not to gag on it without them — was the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Iraq, Jeffrey Fleishman.

“The defendants never met the lawyer who argued their case,” he wrote. “They weren’t allowed to introduce medical or other evidence. There was no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, because there were none. The little testimony given was mainly the denials of the accused.”

The lawyer for the defense had been retained the day before. He had not met his clients, knew their names or had time to acquaint himself with the details of the case, let alone examine evidence or investigate the defendants’ claim that their confession had been coerced from them under torture.

“In Hussein’s era,” continued Fleishman, “the courts did the bidding of the secret police, and in the new Iraq, the courts and police feel the pull of the past as they hand out justice to a nation unaccustomed to democracy.”

US forces abolished the death penalty in Iraq shortly after occupying the nation in April 2003. The new government in Baghdad, however, reinstated it this spring, with some analysts claiming, as a tool of political vendetta.

This type of vendetta may catch up with none other than Saddam Hussein himself within two months, if the issue is left to Iraqi officials to determine. Hussein is accused of allegedly committing 500 crimes.

But Leith Kubba, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, said the government would try him for just 12. “There’s no time to waste on 500 cases,” he said.

Heck, why are these folks in such a rush? Let’s do the maths here. If they can try, convict, sentence and execute three men in two hours, then the judges could convene Saddam’s trial, for all alleged 500 crimes, after breakfast, pronounce him guilty by lunchtime and be home for dinner.

There you have it, dear reader, I present you with modern-day, post-Saddam Iraq, surely a slam-dunk as a trigger for the democratization process in the entire Middle East.