Video Project to Link Van Nuys Courthouse With Faraway Jails

A real-life version of “L.A. Law” will probably debut later this year on the small screen.

Instead of glamorous actors with perfect hair, however, defendants in wrinkled street clothes and jail uniforms will play the leading roles. And there won’t be any steamy sex scenes in lawyers’ offices.

Nonetheless, this show will be extremely popular in some circles, though it will never air on any network.

It is a $659,000 project proposed for the Van Nuys courthouse that will allow judges and attorneys there to interview and arraign jailed defendants over TV-like video screens.

Because fewer inmates will be bused from jail to court, the video interactive program will reduce air pollution, decrease security risks, relieve overcrowding in courthouse holding cells and save transportation costs, according to supporters in the legal and law enforcement communities.

Among its biggest fans are members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who have funded similar programs in the past using cable TV franchise fees.

“It’s an innovative use of technology to make the justice system more effective,” said a spokesman for Supervisor Ed Edelman, whose district includes Van Nuys.

“It’s a good use of the money,” said a spokesman for Supervisor Gloria Molina, who also wants to use the funds to televise the board’s meetings on cable TV public-access channels. “There apparently are enough funds to do both.”

If the board approves the project later this month, as expected, the money would be used to link courts and offices in Van Nuys with the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic, the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys Division jail. (Defendants housed in the Van Nuys Division jail are now bused less than a block away to the courthouse for security reasons, officials said.)

Microwave dishes atop the 10-story Van Nuys Municipal Courthouse will pick up compressed signals from the jails and transmit them via fiber-optic cables to video monitors in offices and courtrooms, said Dennis Shelley, the county’s manager of telecommunications planning.

The signals will be scrambled and encoded to prevent anyone from listening in, he said. Defendants can refuse to be videotaped and instead opt for a face-to-face arraignment, in which they hear the charges against them, respond by entering a plea and have bail set.

The system also will allow public defenders and probation officers in Van Nuys to interview jailed defendants from afar instead of making the 18-mile commute downtown or 23-mile trip to Castaic.

“It’s very hard to say now how much money we’ll save by doing this,” said Richard Johnson, chief of the San Fernando Valley division of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. “How do you put a cost factor on improved security and time-savings?”

Similar courtroom video programs are in place elsewhere in Los Angeles County, including Glendale, Compton, South Bay, San Pedro and downtown in the Criminal Courts building. The latter has handled the highest volume of cases by video since its inception in 1991--36%, or 17,290 of the 47,406 defendants in custody during the same period at Parker Center.

At least 13 other jurisdictions in California have courtroom video systems, according to the National Center for State Courts.

When the concept was first discussed in legal circles in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, critics raised questions about the impersonal nature of the procedure. Some defense attorneys still oppose it.

“It diminishes the presumption of innocence by suggesting defendants need to be kept apart,” said Mary Broderick, of the Virginia-based National Legal Aid and Defender Assn., which represents about 30,000 attorneys.

But local public defenders see the system and its expansion to Van Nuys as a boon to their clients.

“It’s not nice in those courtroom lockups, I’m telling you,” said Assistant Public Defender Michael P. Judge. “They’re crowded, dingy and poorly ventilated, and the clients often end up being there from very early in the morning until late at night.”

Also, even face-to-face arraignments these days are fairly impersonal affairs because defendants enter pleas from behind glassed-in booths known as “cages,” attorneys said.

But no one is suggesting that courtroom video be universally adopted for all proceedings. For instance, a 1986 experimental program that linked South Bay courts to the Sheriff’s Department crime lab failed because it proved difficult to cross-examine expert witnesses on video, said Christopher Crawford, court administrator for the South Bay Municipal Court.

The system was converted to handle arraignments and other court proceedings in 1988. At the same time, other problems, such as camera angles that showed only the top of defendants’ heads, were corrected, Crawford said.

“The future of the county,” said Johnson, the Valley court manager, “is in video.”