Almost 100 years after the ban on cameras in criminal courts was enshrined in law, the first broadcast of an English crown court aired on Thursday and is likely to have left many viewers wondering: “Why has took so long?”
Resistance in the past has often been motivated by fears that allowing cameras could risk turning cases into the kind of media circus seen around high-profile US trials like OJ Simpson or , albeit a civil case, the recent Johnny Depp v Amber. He heard defamation proceedings.
But what viewers saw on Thursday was something entirely different, with cameras focused solely on Judge Sarah Munro QC solemnly delivering her sentencing remarks in a manslaughter case.
Sky News, the BBC, ITN and PA have been given permission to film in court and the broadcasters showed live footage from Thursday.
Before Munro made history, Lord Chancellor Dominic Raab said the move would improve public understanding of the justice system, and anyone who hasn’t attended a crown court sentencing in person may have been surprised by what saw.
Reporters’ coverage of the sentencing comments is inevitably limited, but viewers would have gotten a glimpse of how judges balance aggravating and mitigating factors and are bound by sentencing guidelines, something that often goes unmentioned when there’s outrage for a specific sentence.
Munro spoke for almost 20 minutes before sentencing Ben Oliver, who has an autism spectrum disorder, to life in prison with a minimum term of 10 years and eight months for manslaughter due to diminished responsibility of his grandfather David Oliver.
She found his level of responsibility to be “at the upper end of the medium level range” (the three levels being low, medium and high) and listed aggravating factors such as Oliver’s previous offending: he had been convicted of sexual offenses against a girl. – and the suffering he inflicted on his grandfather.
Mitigating factors included the “irreparable harm” caused by abuse during Oliver’s upbringing and the fact that other family members had argued about David Oliver’s death over unproven allegations of sexual abuse against him.
It was a far cry from the scenes often seen in televised trials in the US. And with Crown Court filming to be limited to sentencing statements only, and even then only when the judge agrees, there’s no threat that an episode like the gauntlet won’t fit OJ Simpson arrives on UK screens.
There are those who would like to see things in England and Wales go further, given that the other benefit Raab posits is transparency.
Chris Daw QC, the author of Justice on Trial, said televised commentary on the judgment was a good first step but would open things up completely, with protections for witnesses and vulnerable defendants, to correct media inaccuracies of communication, but also to show an underfunding of criminal justice. system
“Where there are simply no lawyers to handle the case, they [viewers] they could see the frustration of the judge, they could see the impact it has on the witnesses and the victims, and I think there would be more pressure from the public to do something about it,” he said. “At the moment, I don’t think for the public to realize how completely broken the system is.”
Thursday’s small but significant change comes as transparency is diminishing elsewhere. Introduced in 2015, the single justice procedure (SJP) – administrative decisions made in closed courts – accounts for more than 50% of cases going through magistrates’ courts in England and Wales each year, with 535,000 SJP cases heard in 2020.
In addition, under the Judicial Review and Courts Act, which came into effect this month, other magistrates’ court proceedings are being moved out of open court to be dealt with administratively, a move that critics say , will leave the media without knowledge of the existence. of a “substantial number of criminal cases” at the time they come before a court.