Lift the veil and show us what the jurors see?

"The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, sees some problems in all this. He points to the tension between the public's right to know and the community's "confidence in the administration of justice". If the media edits or selects bits of the evidence the reporting would be very bias and unfair"., [unless you trust corporate media that is? TRIAL BY MEDIA! or trial by a Jury?]

By Richard Ackland Brisbane Times

Widening the gene pool of juries by including lawyers and various categories of former criminals in the selection process is an important step in the shake-up of the justice system.

The recommendations from the NSW Law Reform Commission are a reminder that juries should as closely as possible reflect the wider community, so long as serving cabinet ministers are not empanelled. The commission is seeking to create a greater sense of engagement by the public with the court process and to break down the well established notion that courts are the play-thing of professionals and judges, with everyone else herded in and out as tiresome functionaries.

But to really get the public educated and interested in the process of justice the commission might have gone one extra step, even if that involved a tiny stretch of its terms of reference.

The step is this - why not release to the media, and thereby the public, the same material that the jury has been allowed to see as evidence and to release it on the very same day? There is no good reason for locking the public out of the court room. If a jury sees a piece of evidence it cannot be prejudicial to the case if the rest of the public sees it, too.

In England and Wales they have gone this extra step in the form of a protocol that has transformed the way the criminal courts are reported.

Essentially the prosecutors there release to the media transcripts, camera footage or other evidence on the day it is shown to the jury. It is seen on the TV news and newspaper websites that night.

This has had the effect of removing the idea that the rest of the community is on the sidelines when it comes to criminal trials.

It has also modernised the way cases are reported and removed the notion, at least for TV, that criminal trials are "visually restrictive".

Gone is the formulaic file footage showing the scales of justice and the reporter delivering from outside the court what had happened inside. The TV shots of barristers self-consciously striding down the street have given way to evidence as seen by the jury, such as CCTV footage of the accused, taped police records of interview, voice traffic on phones, footage taken by defendants on mobile phones, maps and models of the scene of the alleged crime and the transcript of the prosecution's opening address.

John Battle, an English lawyer and head of compliance at the Independent Television Network in London, was in Australia recently and gave some insights into just how all this works in Britain. He was a member of the group that helped negotiate the protocol.

Battle said that most of the police evidence would normally be disclosed to the public, but "sensitive" footage or photographs of the victim or other witnesses might only be released after consultation with those parties.

The important thing is that there is a procedure in place that makes most court room evidence available. The British public saw many images on a daily basis of material shown to the court in the case of the failed London bombing terrorism trial. This included footage of the moment one of the accused attempted to detonate a bomb on the Underground right next to a mother and child. In the Jean Charles de Menezes case footage was made public showing police officers running into an Underground station where the victim was shot in the mistaken belief he was a terrorist. In each instance the requests from the media for publication have to be approved by the police, prosecution, defence and the judge. Once that happens the material is posted on a police website for downloading by the media, and anyone else for that matter. Of course, this enlivens the media's coverage of what can be a dry and dusty criminal process, but Battle says that showing what happens "transforms the public understanding of the case". Sometimes judges in the sainted province of NSW have released to the media evidence heard in open court, but invariably it is after the jury has done its work and gone home.

This happened in the Kathleen Folbigg case, where her interview with the police was made public, and in the Sef Gonzales murder trial, where the triple-0 call was subsequently published. The point though is that here there is no system in place. If the evidence is put before the public, this is invariably the product of a piecemeal and inconsistent process.

The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, sees some problems in all this. He points to the tension between the public's right to know and the community's "confidence in the administration of justice". If the media edits or selects bits of the evidence the reporting may be unfair.

In any event, there have been no complaints with the way the protocol has worked in practice in Britain, and it surely cannot be beyond the wit of the Australian media and the court system to work something out here

TRIAL BY MEDIA! or trial by a Jury?
Once a person is charged there should be a media black ban on that case until a jury has found the person either guilty or not guilty. If the media have the power to elect our political parties then they also have the power to find people guilty. Especially people who are being tried over and over again. Now with no double jeopardy rules and majority verdicts in NSW then high profile cases have become susceptible to being tried by the media and not by the jury in my humble opinion.