Court Tv Trials

A round of applause, please, for the judges who have rejected TV cameras in three high-visibility criminal cases. Two of these cases are in Virginia--the separate pending trials of the pair charged with homicide during the vicious sniper shootings that terrorized the Washington area and several states and left at least 10 persons killed and three wounded. The third instance is in Texas where public television thought it would be dandy to videotape jury deliberations in a capital case.

The camera has insinuated itself into nearly every cranny of the culture, the bedroom not excluded. Indeed, we now live--heaven help us--in a social environment dominated by the electronic media. A cable channel devoted to court cases illustrates how thoroughly the justice system has been penetrated.

The solemn rationale is that TV cameras "demystify" and result in a better-informed citizenry. It is, instead, a perverse form of entertainment (the O.J. trial, of course, is a conspicuous example). All 50 states now permit courtroom cameras under varying conditions, though only 37 allow them in criminal cases. Never mind the expressed justifications, televised trials are another slicing away of respect for fragile institutions. These subtractions deform the open society in which restraint is part of liberty.

The arguments on behalf of courtroom cameras are not frivolous. Routine use of television in such a solemn context, however, emphasizes the radical egalitarianism that defers to no one or no thing. A camera significantly if subtly transforms its field of vision and those in it, no matter how carefully controlled; a camera cannot help but trivialize that on which it focuses by introducing a starkly artificial element. There remain pockets of resistance to cameras in the courtroom--the Supreme Court notably. May it ever stand fast against allowing the ubiquitous lens in the august chamber.

Regretfully, to argue against the practice is a losing baffle for the most part for those who contend that the justice system must retain a degree of aloofness to preserve what dignity yet endures--and dignity increasingly is a casualty of the politicization of the judiciary.

Thus, it is heartening that cameras have been prohibited in the pending trials (summary execution now being generally frowned upon) of the pair charged in last fall's vicious sniper killings. Lee Boyd Malvo, 18, is to be tried in November in Fairfax County, Va. A phalanx of network-and cable-TV reporters a few days ago asked Judge Jane Marum Roush to permit them to broadcast the trial, and newspapers asked that still photography be permitted.

"I am concerned with the possible prejudice to Mr. Malvo of photography--whether still or television," the judge said recently in rejecting the requests. Prosecutors opposing the motion raised a dramatically critical objection: the possible effect on jurors--and that shouldn't need elaboration. The judge did give permission for a closed-circuit feed into a county building for relatives of victims, reporters, investigators and members of the public who can elbow their way in.

Malvo's suspected accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, is to go on trial in adjacent Prince William County for one of the sniper slayings there and, likewise, the court also tossed out requests for cameras.

It was not unexpected that newspapers and broadcasters would emote loudly and at length to open these courtrooms under the noble rubric of "the public's right to know"--a "right" that is not enunciated in the Constitution. It is as expected, too, that the media will continue to pry at courtroom doors, notwithstanding the failure in these instances.

The Texas foray by the press, however, is so bizarre that only a tax-subsidized, quasi-governmental body, the Public Broadcasting Corp., would have essayed it. Frontline, a PBS series, pleaded to be allowed to videotape a jury in a murder trial when it convened to reach a verdict. A Texas district-court judge last fall agreed that a Frontline documentary crew could poke its cameras into the jury room in the case of a 17-year-old being tried for killing a man in a carjacking.

A lower-court judge in Houston granted the PBS request. Prosecutors appealed to the state's highest criminal court last month, arguing against the supposed justification for admitting television--that a camera could shed valuable light on the death-penalty process. Among other contentions, prosecutors cited the shatteringly obvious: A camera could corrupt jury deliberations, inhibiting some jurors, bringing

out the exhibitionist in others before the recording lens. (Proponents of courtroom TV adamantly contend that studies show cameras do not have this effect--which studies should be regarded with wry skepticism.)

In its 6-3 decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that videotaping the deliberations, which would have been a first in a U.S. capital case, would violate the "ancient and centuries-old rule that jury deliberations should be private and confidential" That this goofy gambit was spawned in the provinces of public broadcasting is alone sufficient to end all taxpayer money for PBS, a move long overdue.

The most dispiriting part of the case was an observation by one of the judges on the Texas high criminal court that permitting a camera inside a jury room would turn deliberations into "reality TV, like Survivor"--the bottom of television's most odious barrel.

WOODY WEST IS AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR Insight MAGAZINE.

COPYRIGHT 2003 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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