The recent media blast of U of I basketball player Jaylon Tate’s arrest for domestic battery had the poor young man mercilessly accused, tried and sentenced long before he had a chance to defend himself. His hired attorney came to the rescue a day later to announce there exists exonerating evidence, but the damage is done, whether Tate is innocent or not. The case points to the grave need for changes in how we portray crime in the media.
While we have grown accustomed to newspaper and television broadcasts reporting crime incidents mere hours after an arrest, it is understood that these reports represent what police and prosecutors want us to know. This form of “breaking news” gives the state an upper hand in the adversarial system, revealing to the entire jury pool what the evidence is against someone well before the arrested have a chance to answer for the charge.
Rarely do these reports offer circumstances in mitigation or provide any evidence the person may be entirely innocent. The criminal justice system operates in semi-secrecy and image-spinning without protecting the presumption of innocence; nor does it give a full account for its verdicts and sentences on the public’s behalf. No one knows the real record of judges, of prosecutors, of defense attorneys; nor how innocence, dismissals, or guilty verdicts were rendered. No one knows exactly what were the considerations at sentencing. This information is left to a few reporters, like Mary Schenk of The News-Gazette, who cherry pick from the facts she is given from a handful of cases. Schenk writes whatever narrative the state would like known.
The balance between what the public has a right to know, when it has a right to know it, the rights of the accused, and the public record of official government actions has been subject to create-it-as-you-go tradition, developing technologies, privacy issues, and electoral politics. In the interest of protecting the presumption of innocence, while at the same time, provide full disclosure of the criminal justice system’s actions, here below is a proposal toward responsible news coverage and public access of our tax dollars at work:
1) BEFORE all verdicts and trials:
The state’s attorney should release the names of defendants, the charges against them, and the bond, if any, set in the cases. The newspaper may only report this brief listing, and the listing must be daily and a complete list of all cases filed for that day. All arrests and charges filed are to be published. No more shall the evidence against a person be published before a trial in order to protect the presumption of innocence of the accused. This brief list of names and charges allows friends and families of the accused to discover the whereabouts of a loved one. No booking photos should be published prior to a trial. Included in the listing, the state’s attorney should publish in the newspaper the names of people who have had their cases dismissed at the state’s attorney’s discretion. All arrests would then be accounted for.
In extraordinary circumstances where the public’s immediate safety is at issue, say in situations where an armed fugitive is on the loose, serial killers are in the area, kidnappers or a rapist is still at-large; the identifying features, prior booking photos, and video surveillance images of a wanted suspect could be published prior to the suspect’s arrest as a means to help apprehend the suspect.
Eliminating the “trials before trials,” as is currently done in the media, removes about one-third of a daily newspaper’s contents and about 5 minutes of the television news broadcast. The presumption of innocence should take precedence over a commercial media’s need to kill some clock and fill some space. The Daily Illini newspaper quit publishing the names and addresses of the arrested in the late 90’s out of consideration for the presumption of innocence.
These daily listings should also be published on the county government’s website as part of the official record.
Defendants should be allowed to receive copies of the police reports against them as a means to assist in their defense and confront the evidence against them. Whoever the defendant names to receive copies of the police reports may obtain them as well. If the state has a reasonable belief the safety of a hostile witness may be compromised by the release of this information to a defendant; the names and contact information of the witnesses may be redacted before release to the defendant.
If the defendant or his family choose to contact media before the defendant’s trial, media may then publish the contents of a case before a trial. Prosecutors and the police would still be prohibited from releasing evidence of guilt or offering rebuttal opinions to the media prior to the trial.
Witnesses may voluntarily contact the media before a trial and thereby publish their accounts. In the event a case received pretrial publicity, the normal procedures of vetting potential jurors regarding media exposure would be required. If a prosecutor or member of law enforcement is caught prompting a witness to approach the media before a trial, then charges of official misconduct should be levied against the offender.
Under these restraints, it would still be possible to publish the narrative accounts of high-profile cases in the media before a trial, but no longer should they be authored by prosecutors and police departments, as is the case now.
2) DURING pre-trial hearings, status hearings, plea bargain hearings, all trials, petition to revoke hearings, and sentencing hearings:
With the traditional exceptions of sex crime victims, juveniles, and identities of jurors- all court proceedings should be public. An additional step should be the creation of 7 new government cable-TV channels for daily “C-Span-type” coverage of each courtroom at the county Courthouse. The county should maintain a separate website that would archive trials, and defendants who wish to appeal a verdict should have a reasonable time frame by which to obtain DVD copies of every proceeding in their case.
3) AFTER a verdict:
All police reports, contents of discovery (with restrictions regarding children, sex-crime victims, and victims of extreme violence), all video recordings (squad car video, body cam video, street camera video, surveillance camera video, bystander video and courtroom video), audio recordings and written transcripts of the police investigations and court records should be made available to the public and media.
There should also be audio recordings and written transcripts of jury deliberations. Without revealing the identities of jurors, an account for the actual proceedings behind closed doors is essential for defendants receiving a fair trial and a fair verdict. This would eliminate verdicts that were rendered based on in-admissable and irrelevant reasons. The appellate defenders would have more to work with, better grounds for appeals, and the public could be ensured guilty verdicts were delivered fairly, lawfully, and were deserved.
The circuit clerk should be made to publish an annual report on the judiciary where each circuit judge’s decisions are given an annual summary for voter inspection. The amount of bonds and what type of crimes should be recorded. The defendant’s race, age, gender, the crime charged against each defendant, and the sentence handed down on each defendant should be recorded for each corresponding judge. The number of trials a judge presided over and the number of objections they sustained or overruled for which side should be recorded.
Assistant state prosecutors and assistant public defenders should have a similar annual record produced as well.
While there are many tweaks and precautions needed for such a system, the idea is to balance protection of civil rights while providing full accountability of government actions. It would cost more tax money, require more staff, but all is entirely possible in a city with a super computer and big broadband. Transparency and fairness is the best medicine toward justice and democracy. It would be worth the investment.