TV and Still Cameras Will Be Allowed in a Few Federal Courts

Television and still cameras, which have gone everywhere from the moon to the bottom of the ocean, will finally creep into a few federal courts under a plan approved Wednesday by the top judges of the U.S. court system.

Beginning next July, six federal trial courts and two appellate courts will get permission to allow news cameras to photograph, record and broadcast civil proceedings.

However, cameras will not be allowed during trials or appeals of criminal cases. Judges will retain the authority to ban cameras at any time. And the Supreme Court will remain off limits to modern technology, including tape recorders and still photographs.

But Wednesday’s action by the Judicial Conference of the United States is an important, if grudging, step toward allowing cameras into the federal courts, where they have been banned for decades.

The sensational publicity surrounding the 1935 Lindbergh kidnaping trial convinced many lawyers and judges that photographers disrupted the courts and distorted the public’s perception of the judicial system. A decade later, the federal rules of criminal procedure were amended to ban cameras from criminal trials. In 1962, the federal court system excluded cameras from civil proceedings also.

Since then, of course, television cameras have turned their eye on all manner of public business, including the daily activities of the President and Congress. Moreover, 45 states now permit cameras in their courts, for criminal as well as civil cases.

“The pervasive view was that this is something that was inevitable,” said David Sellers, a spokesman for 27-member Judiciary Conference of the United States. The senior judges, who represent the regional federal courts, chose to go ahead with a cautious three-year experiment “rather than have something forced upon them,” he said.

Under the “controlled experiment” approved Wednesday, a committee of judges headed by Judge Robert F. Peckham of San Francisco will seek jurists who are willing to let news cameras into their courts. Only one news cameraman and one still photographer in “suitable business attire” will be allowed into a court, the new policy says. In 1994, the Judicial Conference will decide whether to change the rules to allow cameras in all courts.

After being rebuffed for years, news media lawyers said they were delighted with the change.