LAW : Put Out the Camera’s Eye in the Courtroom

It’s time to turn off the klieg lights. Judge Lance A. Ito should exercise his discretion under Rule of Court 980 and expel the courtroom’s television camera that feeds all others. At best, television has performed with marginal competence and, at worst, it has turned a celebrated double-murder case into the greatest judicial circus in history.

TV could have been the great educator. When O.J. Simpson, who is accused of killing his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, was born in 1947, it was a felony in California for blacks and whites to marry. In 1948, the California Supreme Court, in Perez vs. Sharp, wrote approvingly: “The Legislature therefore permits the mixing of all races with the single exception that white persons may not marry Negroes, Mongolians, mulattoes, or Malays.”

Laws prohibiting interracial marriage were not ruled unconstitutional until 1962, the year Simpson entered San Francisco’s Galileo High School. If Simpson had been an adult charged with a crime in 1962, he would have had little chance of obtaining a jury venire that included African Americans. The U.S. Supreme Court had only just ruled, in 1960, that blacks could not be precluded from jury duty through poll taxes, literacy tests and the like. It was not until Powers vs. Ohio, decided in 1991--when Simpson was 43, retired from football, married and the father of four children--that the Supreme Court prohibited prosecutors from using their peremptory challenges to remove blacks from juries because of the color of their skin.

Television, by reporting this history and much more, could have placed the Simpson case within the “big picture” of U.S. trials.

Instead, television has turned the Simpson trial into a throwback to the Roman Colosseum, a gladiatorial contest surrounded by profiteering charlatans. Television has paraded gossip writers, fortune-tellers, mind readers, fashion critics and, most recently, dog psychiatrists before its audience. Before the trial is over, a dancing bear will undoubtedly cross the screen.

TV coverage of the Simpson case has reduced the most powerful education medium in history to an interactive “People’s Court.” Thumbs up for Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Hodgman, carried off the field of combat by paramedics. Thumbs down for Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark’s hairdo. Thumbs down for F. Lee Bailey’s combative style. Thumbs up and down for Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s opening statement.

The judge and lawyers involved in the trial have sustained frequently brutal personal and professional attacks, largely because of television’s quest for the lowest salacious extractable tidbit available. Judge Ito, who early on succumbed to the television interview “sirens” he warned his brethren against, spent a week supplying everything from his Cub Scout uniform to his family album in response to the gentle questions of KCBS’ Tritia Toyota. Result: Many observers believe Ito’s judgment in submitting to the interviews torched the bridges leading to his further elevation.

Because of tabloid television, lead prosecutor Clark has been required to endure the ignominy of close-up dissections of her two marriages, the character assassination of her first husband, televised questioning of her religious beliefs and a national poll on whether her hairstyle and wardrobe advantageously project her image--as if wardrobe and hairdo were far more important than her advocacy, presentation of evidence and scholarship. For the television mandarins, “Does Marcia look right?” replaced “Is Marcia a good lawyer?” a long time ago.

In fact, is it not astonishing that millions of people refer to this previously obscure career prosecutor as “Marcia”?

But the most outrageous example of the medium’s mindless destructiveness was KCBS’s attempt to gain a fractional ratings advantage by airing a Geraldo Rivera tabloid talk show that deliberately set out to tarnish, if not destroy, the reputation of Cochran, Simpson’s lead counsel. The show’s centerpiece was the appearance of Cochran’s ex-wife, Barbara, and his former paramour, Patricia.

Which brings us to the Channel 2 newsroom. The night before the Rivera show aired, the station’s 11 o’clock news led with a “story” on a claim by Patricia, who is white, that Cochran had told her that if he could get a single African American juror selected, he could obtain a “hung jury” for Simpson. Given the jury’s current racial composition, Cochran presumably can, under this rationale, obtain nine hung juries.

No reporter, local or network, questioned Patricia about her contention. It was Rivera, it turned out, who had “interrogated” her.

Still, Channel 2 news just passed Patricia’s claim along, unfiltered, as news, replaying it from different non-angles for three successive nights. According to Sybil MacDonald, KCBS director of media relations, the reason for a “story” on Cochran’s personal life--”outing” the existence of a son from his relationship with Patricia, broadcasting various unpleasantries uttered by Cochran’s first wife and delving into his marital past--was Cochran’s contention that “race” had been considered as a criterion in jury selection. That was the official reason KCBS gave for airing the story.

A CBS network-owned station covering the most dramatic criminal trial in recent U.S. history turned its newscast into a “teaser” for a tabloid interview show that dealt with black men who lived with white women. Fortunately, no other L.A. television or radio station picked up the KCBS “story.”

The Simpson case was a test of whether television could maturely cover the first trial of a cultural icon in which, like the defendant, the majority of the jury was African American. Instead, it has taken the low road. The jury is black. The defendant is black. If the jury acquits, is justice done? If it convicts, is justice done? What if a white jury acquitted Simpson, or convicted him?

Having been invited into the house of justice as a guest, television has treated the courtroom like a gutter. It is from that apparently familiar location that television now covers the trial.