THE "TRIAL OF THE CENTURY"

RONALD GOLDFARB

In many decades of American history there has been a “Trial of the Century” where the press coverage was excessive and critics complained that the media had to be curbed.

Crime news lies at the heart of one of the more recurring and confounding American dilemmas. The constitutional rights of people charged with crimes to both a “public” and a “fair” trial may present an inherent conflict. If there is too much public attention, that very openness may affect the fairness of the trial. The corresponding press right to cover crime news by its own standard—different from the standard of courtroom judiciousness—may cause a competing constitutional conflict. As the media become more pervasive and more influential, the potential for conflict between the press’s right to present crime news and the defendant’s right to a fair and open trial increases.

To compound the conundrum, the two constitutional rights guaranteed by the First and Sixth Amendments may be complementary as well as conflicting. As one federal appeals court judge put it, “…the right of fair trial is companion, not servant, to the constitutional guarantee of public trial.”¹ The two institutions—press and courts—are mutually reinforcing and occasionally adversarial. A probing press may expose injustices and assure fair trials and censure improprieties by judges, police, and prosecutors. And the courts may preserve press independence when it is challenged.

But the constitutional companion can become a villain. This perplexing conflict was described by the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in an appeal of an Indiana murder conviction and capital punishment that was decided by a jury whose impartiality had been prejudiced by intensive pretrial publicity. Motions for a second change of venue and a continuance were denied. In a concurring opinion to Justice Tom Clark’s reversal, Justice Frankfurter complained:

This Court has not yet decided that the fair administration of criminal justice must be subordinated to another safeguard of our constitutional system—freedom of the press, properly conceived. The Court has not yet decided that, while convictions must be reversed and miscarriages of justice result because the minds of jurors or potential jurors were poisoned, the poisoner is constitutionally protected in plying his trade.²

The problem is not new, but it is profoundly important: its causes and effects are unclear, and its cures controversial.

Originally, the guarantee of an open trial was a common law reform meant to prevent closed proceedings and assure that the public was informed about and could participate in the workings of the judicial system. In the days when the press was neither ubiquitous nor pervasive, the mere presence of the public—albeit a very finite and local public—was the means of subjecting government to the scrutiny of its subjects. Few could quarrel with such a democratic notion. But times change. Sometimes virtues evolve into vices when changed conditions change realities, or perceptions of realities.

During the nineteenth century, a public of local spectators was supplemented by reporters who came to trials and reported what they observed to a distant reading audience. With the invention of the telegraph, immediate reports of criminal trials could be communicated quickly to more universal audiences in distant places. As the media presence and impact grew, problems arose. The very ubiquity of the press threatened to make differences in the kind as well as the degree of publicity pertaining to trials.

From the earliest days of this country’s history to the present, there have been repeated examples of excessively publicized criminal trials. Television is only the latest chapter in a long and evolving continuum of institutional and constitutional dynamics.

JOHN PETER ZENGER

As early as the mid–1700’s, public attention was riveted on dramatic courtroom battles, engaging as much for their capacity for entertainment as for their treatment of vital political issues. The seditious libel case of John Peter Zenger in 1734 has been called no less than “a precedent… for the American Revolution and the Bill of Rights.”³ Andrew Hamilton, the most illustrious trial lawyer of the colonial period, argued the case for the defense, and the account of the trial is featured in most collections of great American trials as having helped establish press freedom to honestly, if truculently, criticize government.⁴ Indeed, the case arose out of a publication that was part of a newspaper war typified by provocative charges and countercharges.

When the jury announced its verdict acquitting the martyred printer, according to one report, “The roar of the crowd seemed to shake the courtroom. Vainly the angry judge rapped for order… The waiting people outside in Wall St… shouted their joy. Broadway answered with resounding cheers.”⁵ According to another account, “Long before the opening of the court the little room was crowded to its utmost… The majority of the people felt that they had assembled not merely to witness the trial of the printer for libel, but that here the last fight was to be made against the administration which was so arbitrarily oppressive.”⁶ In striking a blow against censorship, the widely publicized reports of the case had a remarkable effect on post–Revolutionary America in places far from the courtroom battle in New York City. Even in England accounts of the trial were reprinted far and wide.

AARON BURR

Aaron Burr—senator from New York, vice president to President Thomas Jefferson in 1800 (after the only tie vote in the electoral college), and survivor of a celebrated duel with Alexander Hamilton—twice successfully defended himself against charges of treason presided over by then Chief Justice John Marshall. His trials in Richmond, Virginia, are often referred to both by admiring and critical biographers as an early example of the clash between public opinion and judicial dispassion in the trials of causes célebre.⁷

Reports of the trial told how “the throng straining to get in so far exceeded the capacity” of the chamber that the courtroom had to be expanded. Though promising a fair trial, Burr’s prosecutor, the Attorney General of the United States, Caesar A. Rodney, conceded that reports of Burr’s alleged conspiracy “have resounded through the newspapers so long and so strongly” that they implanted in the public’s mind “the general opinion” that Burr was guilty.⁸ Thousands poured into town to observe the trial, “colonies of tents and covered wagons dotted the northern bank of the river,” and reporters from every large newspaper in the country sent news of the trial all over the world. Washington Irving covered the trial for the New York Gazette.

DANIEL SICKLES

Crimes of passion particularly have provoked sensational trials and yellow journalism for centuries. What now seems an example of quaint male Victorianism—some would call it early American chauvinism—regularly led to crimes of violence committed to protect the honor of one’s spouse or family member who was considered defiled by another man, regardless of the woman’s role in that sexual liaison. Those cases, then as now, generated widespread press attention. ⁹ For example, when in 1859 Congressman Daniel Sickles shot his wife’s lover, Washington District Attorney Phillip Barton Key, notable public figures including senators and congressmen attended the trial, and newspapers around the country, indeed, as far away as The London Times, and including the usually austere New York Times, “commended the honorable nature of the homicide.” Finding a dispassionate jury was thus unusually difficult. After Sickles was acquitted, The New York Post reported, “…extraordinary demonstrations followed the verdict… the shouts of the crowd for ‘a speech’ from Sickles— the offer to unharness the horses from his carriage, that men might take the places of the brutes—the noisy cavalcade rushing and hurrying down the avenue—the gratitude of the old fruit–seller, who presented a basket of oranges to the man ‘who had taught him how to defend his family honor’… the serenade of the lawyers…”¹⁰

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Late in the nineteenth century, a time when we might have assumed the media’s influence on the justice system was insignificant, judicial causes célebre captured the public’s attention no less than now. The notorious alienation–of–affection trial of the prominent and charismatic preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, could have been a modern TV movie. Nationally famous, from a notable family, yet associated with whiffs of scandal, Beecher had clashed with the notorious feminist Victoria Woodhall over standards governing the sexual mores of the times. Eventually, in January 1875, Beecher was sued by his best friend, an editor named Theodore Tilton, for engaging in an affair with his wife, Elizabeth.

It was referred to as the “trial of the century,” an appellation that would be adopted and repeated henceforth time and again, as if the phrase was freshly discovered each decade. The press afforded the case more coverage than any event since the Civil War.¹¹ The six–month–long trial took place in the Brooklyn City Court in January 1875. According to one account,

“The proceedings provided the chief entertainment in town. Tickets were black–marketed at five dollars apiece, and as many as three thousand persons a day were turned away, affording near–by saloons a booming business. Prominent politicians, diplomats, and society leaders fought for seats in the courtroom with ordinary curious folk and went without their lunch in order to hold them, or bought sandwiches and soft drinks from vendors. Newspapers assigned as many as ten reporters to the trial. The audience was frequently unruly, having to be silenced by Judge Joseph Neilson for unseemly applauding, hissing, and whispering—there were several arrests for disorderly conduct….¹²

The summations by the two eminent counsel, “contests of classical erudition and oratory as much as they were legal arguments,” continued for 25 days, and the courtroom audience complimented the barristers’ elocutionary efforts with outbreaks of applause. During the eight days the jury deliberated, sizable crowds congregated in the area and milled about constantly near the court, neighborhood bars were jammed, and people slept on the grass outside the court. Described a source, “Reporters clung to lampposts and crowded out onto window ledges with spyglasses. Diagrams of the jury in various postures of debate were printed and analyzed, and each juror’s background was studied.” When the jury announced it could not reach a decision, throngs of reporters besieged “the unfortunate twelve.” According to the source, “The courtroom was bedlam.”

STANFORD WHITE

Beecher’s was neither the first nor the last of what repeatedly has come to be called the “trial of the century.” Stanford White was a “boulevardier architect,” a fashionable socialite whom Henry Adams dubbed the Moses of Manhattan’s nouveau riche. His extraordinary career seemed straight out of an Edith Wharton novel about rich New York society at the turn of the century.¹³ His architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White, designed several of the majestic public buildings and stately private clubs and mansions of that time and place, including Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square arch. Late in his life, with his business and health failing, White was shot and killed by Harry Thaw, an eccentric millionaire playboy, who was jealous of White’s earlier relationship with the actress Evelyn Nesbit, who had later become Thaw’s wife. At the husband’s murder trial, the actress testified, demurely, that she had been to a great many apartments with Stanford White and believed she had been drugged and seduced.¹⁴

The trial in 1907 was a bonanza of frenzied and feverish journalism, including what one report called “massive and unrelenting character assassination” of the defendant. One report of the case states, “The story was copy catnip.”¹⁵ Characterized as a voluptuary and pervert, White’s reputation was utterly destroyed by the press. Reporters besieged the Manhattan trial court, and Western Union set up a special office to handle the flow of news about the case and its chief characters. The huge crowds broke all prior attendance records in New York trial history.

After a hung jury, in a second trial in 1908, the defendant was acquitted by reason of insanity, and hailed by the public as a hero in an American morality play. E. L. Doctorow included the scandalous trial in Ragtime. Earlier, Ray Milland, Joan Collins, and Farley Granger portrayed the three characters in a movie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,¹⁶ an allusion to the scene of White’s seduction of Nesbit. Press coverage of the seamy details of the lovers’ liaisons was so sensational that the President asked the Postmaster General to forbid news accounts of the salacious testimony to be transmitted in the mails.¹⁷

SCOPES

Another “trial of the century” followed soon, and there radio was the culprit. In what became known as the Scopes trial in a small town, Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow fought over the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution.¹⁸ That trial captured the attention of distant audiences. The amazing trial pitted Darrow, the country’s most notorious defense counsel, against Bryan, one of the country’s most famous conservative political theorists and fundamentalist advocates. Bryan was recruited to prosecute a young high school science teacher and coach for violating the state’s newly enacted anti–evolution law.

The two nationally famous protagonist lawyers (the defendant was simply a pawn in their litigative match) opened the case with cosmic pronouncements: Bryan announced:

The trial uncovers an attack for a generation on revealed religion. A successful attack would destroy The Bible and with it revealed religion. If evolution wins Christianity goes.’ Darrow retorted, ‘Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial. The prosecution is opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages. No man’s belief will be safe if they win.’

On the day of the trial, the courthouse was swathed in Bible –quoting banners, the courtroom overflowed with spectators, and the largest group of journalists anyone could remember seeing at a trial were in attendance. Microphones were set up to broadcast press accounts of the proceedings nationwide and abroad in several languages. One writer reported that the whole town had become “a camp meeting, a Chatauqua, a state fair, a carnival or a belated Fourth of July.” Loud “Amens” could be heard periodically during the proceedings from spectators, and applause greeted the lawyers’ repartee.

Eventually, the whole trial was moved to the lawn outside the courthouse because the unruly throngs in the courtroom were weakening the floor, which was in danger of collapsing. Five thousand spectators, sweltering in the July heat, stood around or watched from wooden benches, and the press sat at tables nearby. A huge banner proclaiming “Read Your Bible” hung from the building in clear view of the jury, alongside another stating “Read Your Evolution.”

After a tumultuous trial which included Darrow cross–examining Bryan on his literal reading of The Bible, Darrow asked the jury to convict so the case could be appealed. Eventually, the appellate court reversed Scopes’ conviction on technical grounds. But along the way, the press had provided the protagonists and their important issue with an historic episode of reporting. While the press had a field day, it was one both sides savored, and the public witnessed an important debate by notable advocates.

THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING

The raucous trial of Bruno Hauptmann in 1935 for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby offers another classic example of the persistence and growth of press coverage of sensational crimes. Charles Lindbergh was a national hero whose solo, trans–Atlantic flight on the Spirit of St. Louis made him famous worldwide. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was the daughter of a socially prominent banker and diplomat. Their perfect life was shattered when their first child was kidnapped mysteriously from their home in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a carpenter who had immigrated to New Jersey from Germany twelve years earlier, was arrested and charged with the kidnapping after a two–and–a–half year manhunt that became a national melodrama followed avidly by the American public. Though the evidence against him has since been seriously questioned,¹⁹ the press presumed his guilt from the first headline, “Lindbergh Kidnapper Jailed,” and press coverage was by any standard excessive and prejudicial.

A courtroom in the small town of Flemington, New Jersey—designed in 1828 to hold 200 spectators, but jammed with 500—a 30 by 45 foot room with 6 pew–like wood benches and a gallery above for spectators, was the scene of the trial. Curious observers from all over the world came to see what H.L. Mencken called “the greatest story since the Resurrection.” The international press arrived in droves, including 350 newsmen (William Randolph Hearst alone sent 50 correspondents) and 130 cameramen. The line was crossed from news to entertainment. Celebrity commentators such as Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, sports figures such as Jack Dempsey, and theatrical stars such as Ginger Rogers made cameo appearances. Some tourists came to see the trial, others to see the journalists and celebrities.

Telegraph and telephone facilities set up in empty courthouse rooms to enable correspondents to file their stories quickly created a “cat’s cradle of wires.” Foreshadowing docudramas to come later in the century, actors performed the trial participants’ roles on radio daily. Hidden movie cameras provided film clips which were shown in movie theatres. Coverage exceeded any comparable event in American history. The press thrust itself into the case, conducting investigations and paying participants for their stories.²⁰ Thousands of sightseers crowded around the courthouse on Sundays, taking pictures of each other in the jury box and the judge’s chair. The trial became “the center of the universe” and “a circus,” to quote the American Mercury. Novelist Edna Ferber added, “It made you want to resign as a member of the human race.”²¹

NUREMBERG

Movies were the next new medium to play a part in the publicity of notorious trials. Films taken by the US Army were used as evidence at the 11–month–long Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1945 and 1946. They also recorded this internationally important historical event, and added a theatrical aspect (a non–judicial feature) to the trial. At these International Military Tribunal proceedings, Army newsreels were used as evidence to prove the involvements of key German commanders in the four sweeping offenses charged. The medium itself, to borrow a future phrase, became part of the message, as well as a new and powerful messenger.

Lighting equipment used to film the trials and record this historical event was so intrusive that several defendants in the dock wore dark glasses. Movie newsreels broadcast excerpts and sound–bites worldwide. The trials in the heavily draped Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice were held not only to punish the guilty, but also to present a public display of this juridical accounting. Few would argue with the judgment of the American special prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, that the trial was not merely a private litigation, but also the public recounting of a great social question. It was ritualistic, but it was educative, as well.

SAM SHEPPARD

As with most important social issues in the United States, the propriety of press coverage of trials eventually would be decided by the US Supreme Court. Indeed, by the middle of the century the high Court dealt decisively with press–created bedlam both in pretrial and at trial in the celebrated case of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a Cleveland physician whose conviction for murdering his pregnant wife eventually was reversed on the basis of press interference.²²

The local law enforcement officials in that case quickly concluded that Dr. Sheppard was guilty, and the press adopted its conclusion and took up an “editorial artillery” of persistent front page assaults on the doctor. A coroner’s inquest, held in a school gymnasium crowded with swarms of reporters and cameramen, was broadcast, though the defendant and his counsel were not allowed to participate. When his lawyer tried to act he was ejected. Years later, Sheppard’s appellate lawyers filed with the Supreme Court five volumes of partisan press clippings calling for Sheppard’s arrest and conviction.

The trial atmosphere was even worse. The jury was not sequestered and was thus besieged by mail and the media. Cameras on a helicopter photographed the jury viewing the crime scene. Commenting on the case, outside broadcasters, Walter Winchell for one, described the defendant as a social menace. The small courtroom was overcrowded with media representatives whose carryings–on were unrestrained. Every aspect of the trial was reported and photographed with intensity and partisanship.

Twelve years after the 1954 trial, the Supreme Court reversed Sheppard’s conviction because the “massive, pervasive and prejudicial publicity that attended his prosecution” deprived the defendant of a fair trial. The late Associate Justice Tom Clark spent eleven pages of his majority opinion detailing the publicity preceding the trial, and five pages describing the intrusive and virulent publicity and commotion at the trial itself. The press had created a “carnival atmosphere,” the Court concluded, and as a result, rather than being a responsible “handmaiden of effective judicial administration” and a guardian against the miscarriage of justice, the press had become the cause of prejudice and passion which the trial court had failed to control. Justice Clark censured the press and the bar, and called upon both to take steps to regulate themselves.

In 1998, newly examined DNA evidence seems to exculpate Dr. Sheppard.

Television came late to the free press–fair trial conflict. The medium itself came into public use around mid–century; but television was soon ubiquitous. As of 1997, over 98% of all American homes have television sets (over 211 million) and 60% of all American homes have cable channels.²³

BILLY SOL ESTES

In its early years, television coverage outside the courtroom merely magnified the general problem of press influence on the trial process. Historic bans against broadcasting in courtrooms barred cameras from courts. In the 1960s, some states experimented with televising trials, and soon (1965) one Texas case led to a Supreme Court decision that temporarily stopped the practice.²⁴

In Billie Sol Estes v. Texas, there was intense local interest in the trial of a financial wheeler– dealer with national political connections. The pretrial hearing was marked by electric cables that snaked through the courtroom, and the whole trial scene seemed to be offended by the presence of the clumsy new equipment. The circumstances played into the fears of traditionalists who doubted television’s maturity. The worst fears of critics—that television would disrupt and demean the judicial atmospheric ideal—seemed to be real. In the Estes case, the Supreme Court condemned the practice, while leaving open the question whether television was banned completely or whether only its excesses would lead to reversal of convictions.

A decade and a half later, in 1981, in the appeal of a Florida criminal conviction, the high court addressed again the constitutionality of televised trials. It deferred to the states the question of the permissibility and monitoring of televised trials. The Supreme Court set out constitutional guidelines allowing states to experiment with televised trials under conditions that assured appropriate trial solemnity. In the following decade, most states did experiment with televising trials, and 48 of them now permit televised trials. By the last decade of the century, a 24–hour–a–day cable channel was regularly televising hundreds of cases.

O. J. SIMPSON

In 1995, all the questions about the propriety of television in courts and its impact outside the court in establishing public opinion came to universal public attention in the extraordinary double murder trial of O. J. Simpson. The year–long Simpson trial was covered on site by over 1,200 domestic and foreign reporters; there was daily gavel–to–gavel coverage by Court TV and by many other television outlets which tapped into the television pool. The case soon spawned a small library of books and articles, along with saturation news coverage of the case and every tangential issue it raised. One report estimated that a worldwide television audience of 150 million people stopped what it was doing in order to watch the announcement of the verdict.

Inevitably, people referred to the case as the “trial of the century.” The crime itself was the stuff of legend, redolent with melodramatic issues to interest everyone—interracial marriage, drugs, sex, domestic violence, the fast Hollywood life. The Los Angeles Times writer David Shaw wrote: “The Simpson story combines the sensational and the substantive, the voyeuristic and the visceral. It presses every hot button. It’s a Bayeux tapestry of contemporary American culture.”²⁵ Serious journalists compared it to Othello, the Greek tragedies, Dreiser; some called it a TV game show, the ultimate reality TV.

The case involved a celebrity almost everyone knew and admired. As a football star, O. J. Simpson had won the Heisman trophy in college, excelled in professional sport for many years, and later was a regular sports commentator on television. In addition, because he appeared in movies and advertisements his presence was widely recognized. Finally, because of his charm and good looks, his image was appealing across racial and economic lines. If ever anyone began a case benefiting from a genuine presumption of innocence, despite prosecutors’ and police claims that they had a mountain of incriminating evidence, it was the popular Simpson.

The announcement of his ex–wife’s murder and his arrest commanded national and international news coverage. A huge, high–tech city of TV and radio equipment (80 miles of TV cables) and a community of permanent and roving reporters settled into “Camp O. J.” in downtown Santa Monica, California, for a year–long siege of trial coverage. The additional administrative court costs to California taxpayers to accommodate all this public attention was over $8 million. People were torn between “indignation and fascination,” The New York Times reported; the trial coverage “hijacked our culture.” A national obsession, it “held the nation in thrall for 16 months,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

The media pursued and was used by everyone having anything to do with the case, and some who had little to do with it. CNN’s anchor, Jim Moret, reported, “We were as much a tool and a conduit for each side as we were an investigating arm of our own organization.” The Los Angeles Times dubbed the media “both players and chroniclers, purveyors of news and pawns of the legal spinmeisters.” The tabloid media paid for stories, but were credited by The New York Times for having shaped the public perception of the case. With The National Enquirer repeatedly breaking stories, the longstanding distinction between the mainstream and tabloid press had become blurred. Network magazine–style shows aired over 100 Simpson stories.

When television was allowed in the courtroom, instead of a roomful of local citizens a global village of worldwide viewers could participate in the extraordinarily engaging trial.

Most of the journalists covering the case watched the trial on television screens in the press office in the courthouse. Of the 58 seats in the small courtroom, 24 were available for the media; seven seats were assigned permanently (to two book authors and five news organizations) and 17 were assigned on a rotating basis. As Los Angeles Times correspondent David Shaw reported, “The media played a pivotal role in this most bizarre drama.” As a result of television the defense attorneys “were trying two cases simultaneously, one in Judge Ito’s courtroom and one, through the news media, in the court of public opinion.” NBC reported that the intense media scrutiny prompted some witnesses to refuse to testify and others to come forward.

As time went on, and the drive continued to report and satisfy the public appetites which the media itself had created, the accuracy of press coverage was questioned. The Los Angeles Police Department press liaison complained that many press representatives had “lost their compass.” Careless and erroneous stories emerged. Journalists began interviewing other journalists, causing one Court TV anchor to complain about an “echo chamber of errors.” ABC’s Jeff Greenfield called the case “the Chernobyl of American journalism.” “We in the media have met the circus, and we are it,”²⁶ Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Rosenberg concluded.

One reaction to this extraordinary public involvement in a criminal trial was to blame television for the sins of jurisprudence. Whatever one deplored about that case—the court management, the lawyering, the jury verdict—was blamed on the camera that recorded it. The Washington Times predicted that the case provided opponents of court television “with their best weapon in 30 years of trying to put trial television off the air.” Indeed, a widespread reaction against cameras in courts followed the Simpson trial. Dissenters, such as former Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner, reminded critics that it was not the cameras in the courtroom that were responsible for all the media commotion, stating, “Indeed, the live camera provides an antidote to some of the media frenzy.”²⁷

CONCLUSION

As each new medium has been added to the press coverage of crime news and the trial process, the same questions have been raised about the press’ impact upon prevailing notions about the nature of the judicial process. Does the public attention to an investigation and trial preclude a fair trial? Do cameras demean and disrupt courts? Do the participants to the trial process—judges, attorneys, jurors, witnesses— negatively alter their behavior because they are being watched widely?

Often, when a notorious trial captures the extraordinary interests of the public and the press, excesses occur. Then, recriminations and resolutions follow. What we call the “trial of the century” has become a veritable genre. In addition to the cases mentioned, many others come to mind: Timothy McVeigh, the Watergate and Iran–Contra trials, the Chicago Seven case, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Charles Manson, Jimmy Hoffa, Muhammed Ali, the Berrigans, Patty Hearst, Sirhan Sirhan and Jack Ruby, to name just a few. Each seemed at the time to be unique in the volume of their press coverage, as well as in the issues raised and the personalities involved.

With the advent of television coverage of trials, the question has become whether differences of degree have created a difference of kind. Critics of the practice believe that television in the courts is the final interference by the First Amendment into the world of the Sixth Amendment. Proponents of the practice believe that, properly administered, television is a neutral mirror, a mannered reflection of reality, the ultimate compromise in an historic dilemma.

NOTES:

Recommended Reading: TV or Not TV—Television, Justice and the Courts, by Ronald Goldfarb. A Twentieth Century Fund Book (NY). New York University, 1998.

Ronald Goldfarb (CC ‘67) is
Senior Partner in Goldfarb and Associates Law Offices,
918 16th Street, NW,
Washington, DC 20009;
phone: (202) 466-3030;
fax: (202) 293-3187;
email: rglawlit@aol.com.

Return to COSMOS 1998 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page