If Tulsa County, Oklahoma, can afford a new jail in 1995, it will be partly to the credit of a video arraignment system from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company.
District judges in Tulsa now hold bail hearings from their chambers via a two-way video hookup with the local jail. (Oklahoma laws prohibit video trials or pleas.) The video proceedings are open to the public, but they are not taped or archived. "Our goal was to cut the costs of transporting prisoners to and from the courtroom and to improve security by not having to take them out of the jail for their initial appearance before a judge," said Captain Jerry Griffin of the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office. "It also gives us a lot more site options for a new jail, since we don't have to build it downtown near the courthouse. That could translate into millions of dollars of savings."
Tulsa's system - which cost taxpayers US$95,000 and will pay for itself in a few years - is a fairly standard commercial teleconferencing setup including remote-controlled cameras, a/v monitors, microphones, and a T1 line to handle the video. It's been altered to suit the court system: a private voice connection allows defense attorneys in the judge's chambers to hold privileged conversations with their clients at the jail. Already, about 175 courts in the US use some form of video technology, according to the National Center for State Courts.
Does this cost-cutting technology aid or hamper the judicial process? Attorneys and defendants rights groups don't seem to mind video justice so long as it is confined to pretrial proceedings. "You have a constitutional right to stare your accuser in the face and make them charge you one-on-one," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Doing that on video sort of takes the accuser off the hook."
Stephen Goldspiel, a staff director of the National Conference of State Trial Judges at the American Bar Association, says some people feel that courtroom video might not be such a great idea even when it's restricted to arraignments. He offers an example of a rare but not unheard-of occurrence: "Take a worst-case scenario: suppose there's an individual who's being beaten up by a guard or police officer and thrown in front of a camera and told to confess," he said. "Is the judge going to be able to tell from the video what's going on?"
Judge Harry McKee thinks so. Using a two-way video link at his east Texas court-house in Tyler, the magistrate hears civil-rights complaints from inmates at a prison 90 minutes to the south in Palestine. "I can move the camera around and see what else is going on in the room, and if I ever thought they were being intimidated, I would bring them up here and ask them," he said. Vendors of courtroom video systems argue that such efficiency translates into swifter justice, both for communities that invest in the teleconferencing technology and for people whose cases are heard using it. "It's good for the accused because judges can do so many more arraignments in a day," said Bill Carney, a Southwestern Bell marketing manager. "If you're sitting in a holding cell, you want the judge to get to your case and set your bail as quickly as possible."
But don't expect an end to docket backlog. Since video justice won't fly when it comes time for a trial, the bottleneck just appears later in the judicial process.
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Pretrial TV
