Lessons from a public trial

“It is just an extra­or­di­nary refu­ta­tion of the prosecution.”

— Jef­frey Toobin,

CNN Legal Analyst

“There’s no way to explain their ver­dict, no log­i­cal way. Maybe that’s the prob­lem. I’m try­ing to apply logic to peo­ple who were illog­i­cal in their jury deliberations.”

— Nancy Grace,

Talk­ing head

I have no idea if Casey Anthony was respon­si­ble for the death of her daugh­ter. Partly, that’s because I have, some­what inten­tion­ally, avoided media cov­er­age of her case. Partly, it’s because after 11 years of being involved in adult crim­i­nal and juve­nile delin­quent cases, I know that unless you’re inti­mately involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion, pros­e­cu­tion or defense of those cases, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to have a good, solid appre­ci­a­tion for the evidence.

Part of the rea­son for my apa­thy toward legal tele­vi­sion is sim­ply over­load. As I sus­pect is true of a lot of peo­ple who work in the legal field, after a full day of deal­ing with legal issues, the last thing I want to do is come home and watch fic­tional cases on the tube. There are a few excep­tions, of course (the early sea­sons of the orig­i­nal Law & Order or the fab­u­lously funny 80’s sit­com Night Court), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full episode of Boston Legal, Judg­ing Amy or L.A. Law.

That’s not to say that those aren’t enter­tain­ing or well done tele­vi­sion shows. To their credit, they at least make no pre­tenses about being fic­tion — they clearly are noth­ing like the actual prac­tice of law. The same can­not be said for the var­i­ous day­time mock-courts or for the myr­iad cable talk shows that pro­vide cov­er­age, ad-nauseum, of crim­i­nal cases. Stocked with so-called “experts,” those shows pre­tend to pro­vide an accu­rate pic­ture of the legal sys­tem but bear lit­tle resem­blance to what actu­ally occurs on a daily basis in America’s courtrooms.

Much is said about the 24-hour news cycle that cable news brings to us. And, it should be pointed out, as I sit writ­ing this two days after the ver­dict, CNN, CNN Head­line News and Fox News are all still talk­ing non-stop about the Anthony case. That’s not to say that media cov­er­age of major crim­i­nal cases is any­thing new. Even in the days before radio and tele­vi­sion there was a “trial of the cen­tury” every few years. Still, cable news raises the stakes considerably.

My prob­lem with tele­vi­sion court shows is not that they aren’t enter­tain­ing, but rather that they pro­vide such an unre­al­is­tic view of how our court sys­tem works, that they skew the expec­ta­tions of lit­i­gants, twist the per­cep­tions of poten­tial jurors and give the pub­lic a warped ver­sion of what they should expect from the third branch of gov­ern­ment. This is par­tic­u­larly true of the day­time shows that pit two peo­ple against one another in an instant-justice, 30 minute smack­down in which the lit­i­gants present no evi­dence and the ‘judges’ are rude and make snap judgments.

It’s just a per­sonal opin­ion, but I have a spe­cial level of ani­mos­ity toward Head­line News’ Nancy Grace. Her angry, unre­al­is­tic and vit­ri­olic style, com­bined with a spec­tac­u­larly obvi­ous degree of sen­sa­tion­al­ism and a near-obsessive focus on indi­vid­ual cases makes her more com­plicit than any other sin­gle per­son in giv­ing Amer­i­cans a false view of their jus­tice sys­tem. To her credit, she is highly suc­cess­ful as an enter­tainer, but when com­pared to the intel­li­gent, thought­ful and insight­ful Jef­frey Toobin on HLN’s sis­ter net­work CNN, her words ring as hol­low, self-righteous and devoid of any true con­tri­bu­tion to under­stand­ing the case that she’s talk­ing about.

The Anthony trial did demon­strate two things, how­ever. First, the 24 hour news cycle enhances the already high like­li­hood of some­one being con­victed in the court of pub­lic opin­ion. Kobe Bryant, Richard Jew­ell and the mem­bers of the Duke Lacrosse team can attest to that. Sec­ond, the instruc­tion to jurors not to read media reports and the rare but some­times nec­es­sary act of seques­ter­ing jurors can still insu­late them from the influ­ence of that media circus.

I have no idea whether the jury in the Anthony case came to the “right” deci­sion, but my expe­ri­ence in the jus­tice sys­tem has taught me not to even ven­ture a guess unless I’m there to watch the pre­sen­ta­tion of evi­dence just as they did. Sound bites, high­lights and talk­ing heads are no way to judge the guilt or inno­cence of an accused.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court. He will not be get­ting a Christ­mas card from Nancy Grace this year.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Jul 7 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.