The Small Screen Can Be a Big Help in Speeding Cases

It can be a jarring experience to watch a judge address a television monitor bolted to the ceiling of his courtroom. It’s even stranger to see the figures on the TV screen--a defendant and his lawyer--reply.

But that is precisely what has been happening in Glendale Municipal Court since 1986, when an interactive video system was turned on linking Commissioner Daniel F. Calabro’s courtroom with a jail holding cell a block away.

Officials say the experiment--in which arraignments and probation violation hearings are conducted--has proven extremely successful. The gains in security are obvious. Particularly promising is that nearly 90% of defendants, defense attorneys and prosecutors agreed to participate last year.

Still, the Glendale pilot project and a similar one in the South Bay Municipal Court are a far cry from a countywide video network. Not even the most optimistic official believes that trials, or for that matter, pretrial hearings involving witnesses, could ever be held via two-way video. A countywide linkup would cost untold millions to operate and would prove extremely complicated due to the county’s bewildering judicial system, in which Superior Court and Municipal Court criminal cases are now heard at 40 locations.

Other alternatives, such as dispatching judges to Men’s Central Jail for minor proceedings, are complicated by the vagaries of the judicial system. Los Angeles County boasts 24 Municipal Court districts, and cases from one district cannot be heard in another.

Plans are afoot to expand the video experiment to Los Angeles Police Department’s Parker Center jail, where Municipal Court arraignments will be conducted with judges two blocks away. Officials had hoped to convert a jail shower into a TV studio, but that design was scrubbed because of a court ruling obliging the LAPD to provide more showers for prisoners.

Two-way TV hookups are also used in San Bernardino and Santa Barbara counties, as well as in several other states.

Robert Mimura, head of the countywide Criminal Justice Coordination Committee, predicts that the use of courtroom video will expand significantly in the next decade, particularly if the county builds a $15-million microwave network now on the drawing boards. “The cost of moving documents and bodies, as well as security issues, make it inevitable,” he said.