Pilot program to allow cameras in circuit court

Pilot program to allow cameras in circuit court


By Ryan Haggerty
Tribune reporter
9:55 PM CST, January 23, 2012

The Illinois Supreme Court will announce Tuesday that it will allow media cameras to record proceedings in the state’s circuit courts for the first time, a court spokesman said today.

The pilot program allowing the media to use both still and video cameras to record civil and criminal proceedings will be enacted “on an experimental and limited basis,” said Joseph Tybor, spokesman for the state Supreme Court.

The media has been allowed to record proceedings in the state Supreme Court and the Illinois Appellate Court since 1983, but until now has not been allowed to record proceedings in the state’s 23 circuit courts.

Several other states allow the media to film and photograph circuit court proceedings, but theU.S. Supreme Courtand federal courts still prohibit the practice.

The decision could affect several upcoming high-profile cases in Illinois, including the murder trials of Drew Peterson and William Balfour, who is charged with killing three members of actress Jennifer Hudson’s family.

Allowing the media to record and broadcast trials should help better educate the public about how the court system works, said Al Tompkins, senior faculty for broadcast and online media at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school for professionals inSt. Petersburg, Fla.

“It is a big deal, and it’s not just a big deal for the media,” Tompkins said. “My excitement isn’t just for the newsrooms that might benefit from this, but it’s for the citizens who now will have free access to something that they were just hallway observers for.”

Those who are skeptical about allowing cameras inside courtrooms often raise concerns about whether the cameras could be a distraction or encourage defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges to play to the television audience.

But Tompkins said that years of recording trials in other states have proven those concerns to be largely unfounded. “There’s no reason to believe that a judge cannot keep decorum in a courtroom,” he said.

Two prominent defense attorneys in Chicago — Sheldon Sorosky and Sam Adam Jr. — both said today that they welcome the change and that the presence of cameras in a courtroom would not change their strategy or approach to a case.

“I think it’s an absolutely terrific thing,” said Adam, a former lawyer for convicted ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who said allowing cameras in court could help deter crime by showing the consequences faced by those accused of wrongdoing. “Transparency is the key, in my opinion. The public needs to see and understand what’s going on in these courtrooms.”

Sorosky, who currently represents Blagojevich, said he was surprised by the decision, given the state’s long-standing practice of barring cameras from circuit courts. He said the presence of cameras in courtrooms will add a new element to cases that might otherwise have been tried under the radar.

Having cameras in court “could cause that trial to have a whole new factor in it that didn’t exist before, because in 99 percent of those cases, the judge or the defense attorney or the prosecutor knew that no one was really looking over their shoulder,” Sorosky said.

Peterson's lead defense attorney, Joel Brodsky, said allowing cameras in court will dispel myths about the court system that are often created in movies and TV shows.

“People get the impression of what a trial is like or what happens in a courtroom from TV and from made-for-TV movies, and that’s not reality,” he said. “I really think that people, when they actually see the system working and the professionals that work really hard in the system, they’re going to be impressed and they’re going to have a better understating of what the justice system is all about.”

rhaggerty@tribune.com

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