Live Justice Comes To the Internet 85
Hugh Pickens writes "The Boston Globe reports that an experiment in live justice is coming to the Internet, uniting citizen bloggers with the public's right to know in one of Massachusetts's busiest courthouses, Quincy District Court. Dubbed Open Court, the project will operate live cameras and microphones during criminal sessions where the court's proceedings will be streamed live over the Internet at the Open Court website to give the public an unfiltered view of court proceedings while an operating Wi-Fi network serves citizen bloggers who want to post to the Internet. 'The idea is that people can live blog, but they can also tweet,' says John Davidow, executive editor in charge of new media at WBUR, who developed the idea for the project, adding that during the next year, the goal is to move the experiment outside the first session courtroom and to stream criminal and civil trials and small claims cases as well. The project was seeking a busy court and found it in Quincy, where last year the court handled more than 7,000 criminal claims and more than 15,000 civil cases, including more than 1,100 restraining orders, nearly 1,000 substance abuse and mental health cases and more than 1,200 landlord-tenant cases."
Phone in vote (Score:3, Interesting)
Lines close at 11, this week on America's Got Time.
Re:Do We Really Want This? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is not the alternative -- it's the opposite extreme.
Allowing a media free-for-all increases the risk of Jurors getting outside information on the case.
Justice needs oversight; but also also needs to be protected from interference. Optimising justice means finding a tradeoff between these ideals.
Re:Do We Really Want This? (Score:4, Interesting)
no, i dont want to see how people with mental problems or people who are found to have smoked some weed but not sentenced are stigmatized. It wont be long until somebody makes a database and offers a service for possible employers to check against.
Searching for the image or the voice of a person is not science fiction any more.
Re:The problem with openness (Score:5, Interesting)
One issue I see with this is that the average person is going to tune into a section of a criminal trial, hear the prosecution's side of things and tune out, having made up their mind that So-and-so is a criminal. Then they'll start talking about it among their friends, some of whom might blog or tweet about it, and before you know it the person is presumed guilty in the public eye. All that before the defense can cross-examine the first witness. When you're limited to being there in person, there's a barrier to entry that tends to weed out the casual gossiper whose only interest is the soap opera nature of a trial.
This is why in Sweden it is illegal to publish the name/identity of the accused until they are convicted. A similar law may be necessary in other countries as such tech becomes more common - a lot of existing laws that balance rights involving privacy assume a certain level of difficulty in accessing the information (e.g. going to the courthouse) that may no longer be the case.