Silence filled the cavernous courtroom.

In sharp contrast, the current trial, in the same cavernous courtroom, has played before largely empty spectators' benches, and television cameras are nowhere to be seen.

In a cavernous courtroom here, decorated with brass chandeliers and oil paintings of seascapes, a drama of kickbacks, corruption and big-ticket finance is unfolding.

But it was clear in the cavernous courtroom yesterday that the bitterness that emerged after Mr. Hawkins's death would haunt the trial.

When the judge's question was met with silence, the 300 spectators in the cavernous courtroom booed halfheartedly, like people who had hoped for more but did not expect to get it.

Lehder to Be Witness "He looks small in this cavernous courtroom," Mr. Sullivan said of General Noriega, "but he was a giant in Panama."

"The evidence will show that there are other people that are responsible," said the lawyer, Arthur Lewis Jr., his voice booming across the cavernous courtroom in Brooklyn State Supreme Court.

The cavernous old courtroom was exceptionally quiet, not so much as a cough or the shuffling of feet from the gallery.

By day, Ms. Mack sits in a cavernous courtroom, wordlessly facing the three officers who commanded a presidential security unit linked to the murder.

On the judge's orders they herded us into a cavernous empty courtroom down the hall, where, for almost three hours, we waited without any sense of what to expect.