Televised Trials Are Here to Stay : Courts: Justice Warren predicted the down side, but the value in citizen education can’t be denied.

Chief Justice Earl Warren was a great sports fan and watched a lot of sports on TV. Perhaps for that reason he was appalled at the idea of cameras in the courtroom. Thirty years ago, he brought the Supreme Court within one vote of declaring televised criminal trials to be unconstitutional.

The Hollywoodization of trials would be their undoing, he wrote, because the search for truth would be subverted into the search for ratings. He worried that trial participants would behave differently under the glare of publicity, and that those watching trials on TV would get a distorted view of the American justice system. They might even be driven to doubt it.

The chief justice predicted that networks would “hire persons with legal backgrounds to provide expert commentary on the proceedings to anticipate possible trial strategy, as the football expert anticipates plays for his audience.”

This prediction has materialized with astonishing accuracy in the O.J. Simpson case. (Warren even predicted the media’s attraction to the trial of a “fallen idol.”)

Yet the reaction to the Simpson case is unlikely to be a wholesale return to the chief justice’s plea to ban TV cameras from criminal trials. For reasons both good and bad, the movement of television into courtrooms has too much momentum to be turned back now.

For all its faults, the Simpson case has demonstrated the tremendous educational potential of a televised trial, stimulating what amounts to a national seminar on issues of race and justice.

Add several less savory but nonetheless powerful considerations--the power of the media, the self-interest of elected judges and prosecutors in exposure to the electorate, the self-interest of defense counsel in exposure to future paying clients--and it becomes safe to say that the cameras are here to stay.

Rather than banning cameras in reaction to the Simpson case, judges are more likely to help trials play better on TV without compromising the fairness of the process. The first step is that judges recognize the legitimacy of this goal.

To many, concern for the TV audience will seem anathema, a corruption of the judicial function. But just as the military came to terms with fighting wars on television, and even learned to do that well, so too the judiciary will strive to make peace with the cameras and still do justice.

Lessons from the Simpson case should lead judges to look for ways to curb the lure of celebrity on trial participants and ease pressures on the jury. Judges might limit the number of lawyers who may present each side of a case. This would avoid one-day designated legal hitters for whom the temptation to grandstand--making as much of their 15 minutes of fame as possible--could be overwhelming.

Judges might reaffirm their mandate to eliminate wasted time from trials. Juries do not appreciate belabored presentations any more than TV watchers do.

In the jury selection process, judges might stop discriminating against people who are well-informed. They could rely more heavily on the ability of jurors to decide the case on the evidence and not on whatever they read or saw before the trial commenced. This would speed the selection process and result in a more interested jury, and might even lead to fresh consideration of the necessity and wisdom of sequestration.

The biggest risk in the Simpson trial is one that cannot be headed off by even the most careful of judges. It will materialize if the jury splits along racial lines and the millions watching conclude that where race is concerned, there is no truth, only point of view.