Jon Katz–> Lately, the so-called Nanny Trial reminds us what the O. J. Simpson trial proved once and for all: Modern media have become an overwhelming force in our criminal justice system.
The techno-mobs that gather at trials like O. J. Simpson’s and Louise Woodward’s make obsolete the old boundaries set up around the criminal justice system – the images and information the media transmit come through walls, under and over doors, and through the air we breathe.
The Nanny Trial has hypnotized us as media and law again collide, this time transfixing the motherland across the ocean as well. Watching the shock and bewilderment in England, Americans have started to realize that our own growing discomfort is justified.
Once again, the tabloid and straight information cultures have fused. Once again, screen time and air time on cable, the Web, talk radio, and elsewhere are filled with quarrelling experts and analysts. Once again, a few images – this time it’s anguished parents and a sobbing teenage girl – are repeated again and again all over the world.
Whether or not English notions of justice are different from American, the Brits are neck and neck with Americans in learning to manipulate the power of television. Those English know well what their queen only realized just a few months ago – you can’t grieve often enough or loud enough for the tube. The only thing television loves more than a burning building is a group of people shrieking.
All big stories like the Nanny Trial have subtexts. In the Simpson trial, it was race. In Woodward’s, it’s child care. Is it really OK to have kids we can’t or don’t want to take care of? Is it OK to turn them over to untrained people who are often barely past childhood themselves?
The Woodward trial raises many of the same troubling questions the Simpson trial did, and reminds us that they are still unanswered.
Do our systems of jury selection and deliberation work in the digital age? Do we pick the best-prepared jurors? As forensic evidence becomes more complex and scientific, should members of a jury pool be held to a higher standard of learning and comprehension?
Do our current notions of a jury system promote fairness or ignorance? Should the public see and hear so much more than the jurors do?
The Woodward jury, like the Simpson one, was shocked and wounded by the public reaction to its findings. Like the Simpson jury, this one was criticized as being overwhelmed by the scientific testimony and ill-prepared to grasp it.
It’s already clear that massively publicized trials like the Nanny and Simpson cases are in themselves big-business, multimillion-dollar commodities. This can’t help but affect the work of many principal players. Journalists, lawyers, defense and prosecution witnesses, and, most disturbing of all, jurors, all know that lucrative book and tabloid interview deals are waiting on the other end.
Trials like these can make poorly paid journalists who cover them rich, providing they keep the good stuff for later book deals. Reporters covering big stories now routinely save information for their books – the revelations still pouring out of the Simpson trial, withheld until lucrative book contracts could be signed, represent an unacknowledged scandal for journalism.
Even though everything about the way such trials are covered has changed dramatically, from the ability of judges to keep jurors away from news coverage to live courtroom broadcasts to the dollar value of accounts of the proceedings, almost nothing about the way the trials themselves are conducted has been changed. Is this appropriate?
Modern jurors are under enormous pressure from the media to explain and justify themselves once verdicts are in. In controversial cases like the Simpson trial, jurors have said they knew their neighbors and friends, glued to TV sets all day, had strong feelings about the trial. One of the Woodward jurors told CBS News that after seeing how this jury was treated by and in the media, he’d never serve on a jury again.
Perhaps jurors, and the judges who supervise them, ought to be taught how to deal with the information age, rather than simply pretending it isn’t there.
Journalism can’t seem to transcend its presentations of such trials as sporting events – winners vs. losers, prosecution vs. defense, one talking legal head against another.
Despite the mind-numbing volume of coverage, the truly significant questions are the ones almost never even asked.
Katz: Questions at the close of the O. J. saga Richard Jewell may be innocent, but the press? Guilty!
Jon Katz loves to get email.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
