TELEVISION : We, the (TV) Jury : Courtroom TV, a new 24-hour cable channel, goes for the reality, but some fear that it will harm the sanctity of the judicial system

The TV camera zooms in for a tight shot of a teen-age girl accused of murdering her father because he allegedly tried to rape her. Teary-eyed Tracie English is on trial in a Louisville, Ky., courtroom. The prosecutor has asked the 16-year-old to get down on the floor and re-enact how she grabbed a gun and shot to death her father.

Cut to the studio: Silver-haired, courtly anchor Fred Graham is interviewing Barry Scheck, a prominent defense lawyer. Scheck, who speaks with the practiced ease of a talk-show regular, is handicapping the girl’s testimony as she is being grilled by the prosecutor.

“There’s a real problem in how she said it happened,” Scheck confidently advises the viewers as if he were delivering color commentary on a football game. “Because if she’s banging up against that TV set, she’s going to knock the pistol off it, and if he sees her grab it from the position that her father was supposedly in, wouldn’t he try to grab for that gun? . . . Very tough story.”

Graham smiles, nods knowingly, and the program switches back live to the Louisville courtroom. Tracie English has returned to the witness chair. On the TV screen flashes the headline “A Killing in Kentucky,” followed by the more pressing question: “Cold-blooded murder or self-defense?” (English was convicted.)

Welcome to what is billed as the next breakthrough in television programming: a 24-hour cable channel that shows nothing but scenes from some of the most notorious criminal and civil trials throughout the country. Trumpeted as a cross between CNN and “L.A. Law,” the Courtroom Television Network is scheduled to premiere Monday after more than two years on the drawing board.

Courtroom TV is the brainchild of Steven Brill, the flamboyant editor and publisher of American Lawyer magazine. Brill wants to do to the court system in the United States what American Lawyer did for the legal profession: knock it off its pedestal, unleash a pack of hungry journalists on it and give it a good public airing.

That, not surprisingly, troubles some law scholars and others in the legal fraternity who say that Court TV could rupture the sanctity of the judicial system. They are worried that sports-like play-by-play commentary and second-guessing by “experts” interjected into live coverage could in some cases be grounds for a mistrial.

“This will have an impact on all participants in a trial--the jurors, the judge, the lawyers and witnesses,” predicts Michael Bender, a Denver criminal defense attorney and chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Assn. “Contrary to all the anecdotal evidence you hear, when a camera is around, people act differently, and that will distort the basic protections of the system.”

Warns Laurie Levinson, professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former U.S. prosecutor: “People are going to be watching this thing, and jurists are not immune from contact with others in society. There is really potential for tainting the jury.” Few juries, she notes, are ever sequestered during trials.

Bender and other criminal lawyers believe that mistrials could result if it can be proved that a juror has been exposed to coverage of a trial, which would increase dramatically because of the expanded reach of television.

But the impact of Court TV on the judicial system will likely not be known until after it has gone on the air, and some point out that initial worries over grandstanding prosecutors or fortune-seeking defense lawyers are similar to the claims--now largely dismissed--that once were made against televising Congress in action.

Furthermore, Brill appears to have backed away from his pronouncements about putting the judicial system under a microscope. He now says Court TV will try to avoid the Monday-morning quarterbacking of live testimony that appeared on the network’s test run earlier this year (and which included the Louisville murder trial). Market research revealed that viewers wanted to decide for themselves questions about guilt or innocence, he says. Moreover, the tests found that viewers didn’t like smiling anchors because trials are deemed to be solemn occasions.

Like the so-called tabloid TV shows of a couple of years ago, courtroom programs are becoming this year’s hot new genre. CBS premiered the first of eight episodes of a new prime-time series titled “Verdict” on June 21. Each program shows one trial from start to finish. NBC’s daytime “TrialWatch” series, which premiered in January, didn’t muster enough ratings, however, and will be canceled July 26.

Actually, courtroom drama has provided plenty of fodder for TV programs over the years, going back 30 years to such shows as “The Verdict Is Yours,” “Famous Jury Trials,” “Traffic Court” and, more recently, “The Judge” and “People’s Court.” But all those programs, except “People’s Court,” relied on make-believe or re-creations. Court TV and the other new entries boast that they are going after the real thing, which they claim is more dramatic.

Despite the competition and the poor track record of start-up cable networks, some of the country’s biggest media companies are betting that Brill, a natural-born showman as well as a journalist, can turn the frequently somnolent courtrooms into good television. Time Warner Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., NBC and Tele-Communications Inc. have agreed to bankroll Brill’s network, an investment that could total $60 million over the next four years before it becomes profitable. Cablevision and NBC became involved after they decided to merge their own similar plans for a courtroom channel into Brill’s operation.

Forty-four states now allow TV cameras in the courtroom, although the particular rules vary greatly by state and judges can ban cameras at their own discretion. (Cameras were booted from New York state trial courts earlier this month when the state Legislature did not renew a three-year test.) And on Monday, the day Court TV is scheduled to go on the air, a three-year test permitting cameras in eight federal court jurisdictions will also begin.

Brill will not discuss how many subscribers Court TV has until after it is up and running. No system in Los Angeles will be carrying it immediately, but presumably it will be on at least some of the cable systems owned by Time Warner, Cablevision and Tele-Communications. He admits that sponsors initially may not be banging down the door. “Our advertising will be slow coming in the beginning.”

Indeed, Madison Avenue is far from sold on the idea of Court TV, even if it eventually achieves the 30 million subscriber benchmark commonly cited as the level needed to attract national advertising.

“There are concerns among many advertisers about the content problem,” says Jack Deitchman, senior vice president at Ogilvy & Mather, a New York advertising agency. He notes that language and subject matter during testimony could drive away advertisers who would find the “program environment” inappropriate for their products.

Brill says the idea for Court TV came to him one day three years ago when his taxicab was stuck in New York City traffic. The taxi’s radio was tuned to a station that was broadcasting a news report on the Joel Steinberg trial. Steinberg, a criminal attorney, was being tried on charges of beating to death his adopted daughter. His companion, Hedda Nussbaum, was testifying for the prosecution. He ultimately was convicted of first-degree manslaughter.

“I thought we should do a C-SPAN of the court system, only it wouldn’t be like C-SPAN,” Brill recalls. C-SPAN broadcasts congressional committee hearings and Washington press conferences, but without an editorial filter: The network simply points a camera on the podium and broadcasts the events in their entirety.

Brill pitched the idea of Court TV to Steven J. Ross, then chairman of Warner Communications. Ross liked the concept enough that he agreed to buy out Associated Newspapers, Brill’s partner in American Lawyer. Court TV, however, then got put on the back burner for more than a year after the merger of Time and Warner.

But Brill is not copying the civics-lesson format of C-SPAN. Instead, Court TV will use all the high-tech editorial gimmickry of TV news, such as live “remotes” from the courthouse, cross-talking anchors, studio analysis and computer-generated graphics.

Courtroom TV figures to rely heavily on the staffs of Brill’s 11 regional legal newspapers to identify compelling cases from among the 2 million court trials that take place annually. The staffs each week update a computer database that tracks noteworthy trials around the country and all their particulars--the presiding judge, prosecution and defense attorneys, case summations--and grades them on a point system for notoriety and public appeal.

Still, the tracking report is heavy on murder trials and other sensational cases, and descriptions read like classic tabloid stories about gangland-style killings, hate crimes and “Fatal Attraction”-type murders.

Court TV executives reject the suggestion that they are going for only the salacious and tabloidesque trials as a way to attract viewers. “Is the L.A. cops trial ‘titillating’?” says Merrill Brown, the network’s vice president of corporate development and programming. “We would call it ‘compelling.’ ”

Brill states that the trials covered by Court TV must also have some underlying issue that warrants coverage. Such trials as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s slapping of a Beverly Hills cop--a favorite among the tabloid TV shows--don’t deserve to be shown on Court TV because there are no issues at stake other than celebrity antics, Court TV officials say.

“There are two types of compelling,” Brill says. “There is gore. And then there is the compelling of putting someone in a place they haven’t been before.”

He draws the distinction: “There was a Florida murder case of a pregnant woman. The same week in Florida there was a trial involving a divorced husband who was trying to regain custody of his kid because his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness. Now, that’s a more interesting case. I can’t think of a better way to explain the separation of church and state.”

Court TV also exemplifies the bargain-basement mentality taking root in the television news business today. Although one of Brill’s first acts in launching Court TV was to hire former CBS News law correspondent Graham as the centerpiece and one of the network’s anchors, the new cable channel is not otherwise doling out a lot of money for big-name talent.

“This is all about the development of programs at low cost,” explains executive producer Stephen Cohen, a former news director at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles and longtime CBS executive. He boasts that his newsroom will number only 40 employees--no bigger than that of a medium-market TV station.

Courtroom TV’s live daytime programming will jump between two or three trials simultaneously. Prime time will be given over to highlights from that day’s trial coverage. About once every 10 days, Court TV will substitute in prime time a three-hour “documentary” on some case or legal issue. Much of Court TV’s weekend programming will consist of taped repeats from the week’s trials and professional education programs targeted to lawyers. There are even plans for a “Night Court Live” show on Friday nights.

“The traditional forms are almost all dried up,” Cohen proclaims in outlining the network’s programming plans. “We have the short form under control. Now it’s time for the long form. I really think that mass TV is over. It’s all demographic slices moving forward.”

Which raises the question of who Court TV is targeted for. Brill and his associates think the channel will naturally appeal to people who watch daytime soap operas--whose sex, scandal and double-crossing story lines are not unlike the real-life trials that Court TV hopes to broadcast.

For Brill at least, the real thing is more entertaining as well as informative than fictionalized drama. “There are so many cases out there, we can show that the American legal system is not all ‘L.A. Law’ or Clint Eastwood.”