“A free, strong press is fundamental to democracy,” the lady chief justice of England and Wales told reporters yesterday.
Giving her first news conference since taking office last October, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill said she knew of the pressures that that journalists were under in terms of workload and resources.
“But I am keenly aware that the public’s understanding of the judiciary and the work that I am doing and the administration of justice as a whole is based in very, very large part on what the public reads in the press,” she continued. “So, for me, strong, high-quality reporting is very much in my interests as well as in the public interest.”
Carr disclosed that she was setting up a transparency committee which would consider, among other things, how televising the courts of England and Wales could be enhanced. At present, both civil and criminal proceedings in the Court of Appeal can be viewed, subject to conditions. Carr suggested broadcasting might be extended to the commercial court as well as to the divisional court — which decides claims for judicial review, sometimes in high-profile cases but usually without hearing oral evidence.
In the Crown Court, it’s possible for judges’ sentencing remarks to be televised. Carr was clearly very much in favour of this: “haven’t the last few weeks shown the impact of live broadcasting of sentencing remarks in these horrendous criminal cases,” she remarked.
But permission to sentence defendants on camera is given only to High Court judges and others with sufficient seniority. “I am very interested in extending filming to a wider cohort of judges than is the case currently,” Carr said.
Opening up the courts had been a success because it had been introduced slowly, she believed. “We can't do anything that jeopardises the administration of justice and I think there are, in that context, real difficulties about filming witnesses, for example.”
Might it still be possible to broadcast more of a criminal trial, she was asked:
The fear is, obviously, we want the best evidence from the witness, so we don't want the witness worrying about any more than they already have to worry about. So it’s getting the best evidence from the witness. It’s making sure that nobody starts playing to the crowd, and I would suggest it also means making sure that people aren’t watching for the wrong reasons: that they aren’t getting a kick out of somebody's distress and misery, which is almost inevitably there in these difficult cases. So I think there are lots of things to look at.
Carr will be spending much of the coming months speaking to her fellow judges. One of her messages will be that transparency in the courts is just not an add-on: “it is a fundamental part of the process in allowing proper access to justice”.
In case you missed this piece published yesterday afternoon:
I remember, as a teenager, being taken by an uncle to watch one day of a lengthy murder trial at the Old Bailey. Next day, my uncle and I read a report of the day’s proceedings in The Daily Telegraph. It was as if we had been watching different proceedings. It taught me that two people can see the same thing quite differently. Whether this would happen with televised trials is hard to predict but, on balance, I think attempting it is worth the risk. It is hard to see how transparency can be achieved otherwise. And, there have been so many advances in technology that many of us have become used to meeting via Teams or Zoom in a way we could hardly have imagined a decade ago. I don’t feel uncomfortable, and I don’t see people “acting up”, at online meetings, so I doubt if they will during court proceedings. At least, not more than they do already!
I'm in the U.S. When I was young there were two local newspapers and both had brief case reports from the Supreme Court (In NYS the Common pleas courts are Supreme Courts), the County Courts . the local courts &c. Now there's only one newspaper owned by Gannett; they've even done away with the city desk. So it's quite bad here and I agree with the gist. Open the doors, let it be known.
I did my 1st oral presentation via internet c. 2022 in an intermediate appellate court in another State. The peculiar thing there is (a) you're proscribed from recording it and (b) no transcript is available !!
In so many ways, England is so far ahead of the U.S., it's embarrassing.