Gutterman: The media-trial circus act

Roy S. Gutterman is an associate professor of communications law and journalism and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University. In 2009-10, he was director of the Newhouse/Carnegie Legal Reporting Program.

Despite the sensationalistic headlines, tabloid television blasts, and the cacophony of TV prosecutors, legal experts, hangers-on and Internet followers, the Casey Anthony murder trial reinforced some important democratic principles about how justice is administered in this country.

This latest "trial of the century" turned millions of living room televisions and computers into personal courtrooms, giving viewers a juror's-eye look at the lawyers, the evidence and the defendant.

TruTV, airing the trial, saw its ratings skyrocket, as did its sister channel, HLN (formerly known as CNN's Headline News Channel). After nearly 10 hours a day of courtroom coverage during the almost six-week trial, HLN sometimes filled its nightly schedule with up to four hours of Anthony programming: television hosts, legal experts and even ordinary people who were swept into the maelstrom of the case, many yelling into the camera.

Of course, widespread public interest in sensationalistic trials is nothing new. Newspaper accounts of the first "trial of the century" in 1906, in quaint Herkimer, N.Y., described mobs flooding the courthouse just to catch a glimpse of Chester Gillette, who was convicted of and later executed for the murder of his girlfriend, Grace Brown. Thousands of spectators turned out to see Gillette's train pass through town on its way to Auburn Penitentiary, where he met his fate on the electric chair.

Bruno Hauptmann's 1935 trial for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in Flemington, N.J., was so nuts that famed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called it "the Flemington circus." Cleveland in the 1950s and '60s was obsessed with the trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard, the inspiration for "The Fugitive," as well as conspiracy theories still debated today.

The template for the modern-trial media spectacle is the O.J. Simpson case -- which made celebrities out of nearly everyone involved. The Los Angeles Times printed a special edition the day Simpson was acquitted, the streets surrounding the Los Angeles County Courthouse were clogged with satellite trucks and spectators, and the trial was covered on cable television gavel-to-gavel.

But that media circus was still mostly old media, and it pales in comparison with what occurred over the past several weeks. The Anthony case took place after a decade and a half of technological and multimedia advancements, ranging from better, less obstreperous courtroom cameras to graphics and digitized evidence viewable on the television screen.

On top of the vast blocks of television screen time, there were websites that streamed courtroom video live, observers who live-blogged from the courthouse, and other online communities that not only provided information and opinions on every aspect of the trial, but also drove public interest by facilitating mass commiseration.

People traveled from all over the country to observe the trial. Some lined up and camped overnight to get a seat in the courtroom. After one stampede sent a woman to the hospital, authorities instituted a formal admissions procedure. Another time, the desire to get a seat in the courthouse sparked a brawl between people waiting, which was captured on video and thoroughly parsed and analyzed later on TV.

Self-appointed leaders on line to get into the trial had nicknames and became quasi-celebrities themselves. One woman, known as the "Sharpie Lady" because of her pen, sought to organize the line by keeping a list of people waiting, like the first person to arrive at an estate sale. Some of these newly minted celebrities almost make Simpson hanger-on Cato Kaelin look legitimate.

If many of those people devoting their nights and days to get into the courtroom were actually interested in the jurisprudence, constitutional issues and the public policy going on in this courthouse, it was most likely offset by the demi-celebrity status they achieved when courtroom observers were interviewed on TV later that night, as many of them were.

But every "trial of the century" serves an important constitutional purpose. One of the hallmarks of our democracy is the tradition of open, public and speedy trials. The Sixth Amendment provides those accused of crimes an important level of fairness. Critics point to numerous inequities in the criminal justice system, but it is still the fairest ever created.

The openness of our justice system also plays into another important constitutional right under the First Amendment, the press' and the public's right to attend and cover judicial proceedings. Even though hordes occasionally cram courtrooms, the general public doesn't have the time or means to observe most court proceedings. The media serve as their surrogate.

In one of the biggest Supreme Court cases to balance fair trial-free press interests, Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, in 1980, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote of the numerous benefits of public trials.

"We hold that the right to attend criminal trials is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment; without the freedom to attend such trials, which people have exercised for centuries, important aspects of freedom of speech and of the press would be eviscerated," he wrote.

Along with the media circus that accompanies each trial of the century, the public observes some of the most important elements of our living democracy. Citizens can absorb a range of legal and democratic principles, from the role of a jury in meting out justice to the intricacies of court procedure and elements of a crime.

The public learns about new science and technology. Just remember what the Simpson trial did for DNA analysis, which has since helped exonerate possibly thousands of people deemed wrongfully convicted. The recitation of facts, procedures and standards on display through our justice system delivers a dose of reality and doctrine that even the best-scripted TV shows cannot provide.

Chief Justice Burger may have summarized it best back in the Richmond Newspapers decision: "People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing. When a criminal trial is conducted in the open, there is at least an opportunity both for understanding the system in general and its workings in a particular case."

The media circus trial might come with a compelling sideshow, but what goes on in the main ring, the courtroom, provides a living lesson in justice.