TV Conveys Drama--and Opens Up Courts

Even the wisecracking cynics in the pressroom grew silent Friday when Nicole Brown Simpson’s neighbors described her dog howling in the night and wandering the streets, paws covered with blood, before leading a horrified couple to the death scene.

As millions of others did, we watched it live on TV. We were gripped by the description of a scene that would break any heart--the wailing dog grieving for its master.

I don’t know how the other reporters felt, but I knew I could never write anything that would capture the haunting nature of the testimony. Nor could I convey the terror on neighbor Bettina Rasmussen’s face as she told of finding Nicole Simpson’s body--or the look on the face of the accused murderer as he listened.

Only live television--immediate and urgent--could convey the emotion. That is why the televising of this trial is exerting an influence on the opinions of millions of viewers, including potential jurors.

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Since I began writing these columns, I’ve encountered people who wanted to know why the preliminary hearing is being televised live. Knowing that live TV is such a powerful force, they wondered who authorized it or if anyone has considered the ramifications.

Actually, live televised courtroom proceedings have been commonplace here and elsewhere in the United States for several years. It’s given birth to Court TV, which most recently carried the trials of the Menendez brothers.

So commonplace is live coverage that when the Simpson hearing was announced, both Superior Court Supervising Judge Cecil J. Mills and Municipal Court Supervising Judge Victoria Simmons McBeth assumed it would be carried live.

Mills told me that the Judicial Council of California policy is that “we should admit the press unless there is some justifiable reason not to.” Live TV coverage, he said, is as much a part of the press as reporters with note pads.

From this matter-of-fact attitude, you’d never guess what a long struggle preceded the cameras taking their place in the courtroom.

Newsreel cameramen and still photographers were kicked out in 1937 after wild, unrestrained press coverage of the trial of the Lindbergh baby kidnaper, Bruno Hauptman. The ban was instituted by the American Bar Assn., whose canons of judicial ethics were a model for state and federal judicial rules. In 1952, the ABA added television to the ban.

The tide turned in the 1970s in Florida, a state with “sunshine laws” opening all sorts of meetings to the press and public. Writer Martin Clark Bass, in a 1981 New York Times article, said Florida legal authorities were also concerned by “the appalling ignorance about and distrust of the courts as evidenced by a number of studies conducted by court-connected organizations.”

Florida’s experiment with televised trials eventually ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court after two Miami Beach police officers on trial for burglary objected to a television camera in the courtroom and appealed their conviction. In January, 1981, the Supreme Court, in an 8-0 vote, ruled that the states may permit televising of trials. Television coverage, wrote Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, does not automatically violate a defendant’s right to a fair trial, even if the accused objects.

He said “an absolute constitutional ban on broadcast coverage of trials cannot be justified simply because there is a danger that, in some cases, prejudicial broadcast accounts of pretrial and trial events may impair the ability of jurors to decide the issue of guilt or innocence uninfluenced by extraneous matter.”

That decision opened the way to today’s routine live trial coverage.

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This trial, of course, is anything but routine. It’s a circus, both inside and outside the Criminal Courts Building. Aware of what would happen, the Superior Court’s Judge Mills and Judge McBeth of the Municipal Court got together early and wrote rules for the press. They remembered innocent passersby being trampled by frenzied journalists during accused celebrity madame Heidi Fleiss’ court appearance.

News conferences, for example, are restricted to the lobby, or up in the 18th-floor district attorney’s office. McBeth allocated seats in the small courtroom to the press, public and family members of the victims and the accused.

But these restrictions don’t detract from the judges’ dedication to an open court, a position they carry to its limit by favoring live television.

“It’s bound up with the public’s right to know,” Mills said.

McBeth agreed, adding: “The more information people have about how the courts operate, the more the people will respect them.”

McBeth is correct to be concerned about respect. A Times poll of Los Angeles residents, taken just after the Reginald O. Denny beating trial in 1993, showed that 64% of those surveyed did not believe the criminal justice system here is basically sound.

Other surveys, interviews, public and private dialogues and many of the actions and rhetoric after the Rodney G. King beating reflected this feeling. It’s widespread, shared by 66% of the whites surveyed, 71% of the blacks, 62% of the Latinos and 50% of the Asian Americans.

Televising the Simpson hearing is useful to the prosecution and defense in shaping public opinion. It may be the most important weapon in their spin control arsenal.

It’s also great theater. But most important, this heavily viewed event will educate us about that powerful but often mysterious public institution, the courts.