Not Quite The Whole World Is A Stage
I keep seeing people saying that trying the “terrorists” in US courtrooms will give them a stage. That displays nothing but the speaker’s ignorance.
Ever see video of a trial? Isn’t wasn’t taken in a Federal courtroom. Audio? Still not Federal. How about photographs? Nope, no photography in Federal courtrooms.
If these guys are looking for a stage, they would get a bigger audience off Broadway, or at a Fringe festival.
Federal courtrooms are not large, and you need to be able to take written notes if you want to report from one. Large media outfits might have a courtroom artist, but that’s the extent of the visuals. So, the information coming from the Federal courtroom in any of these trials is dependent of the handwriting of journalists, if there are still any journalists with the requisite skills.
Most of the defendants do not speak English. Any speeches will have to be translated, which is not exactly conducive to stirring rhetoric, and most translators these days are not native English speakers, so reporting on any speeches will be extremely condensed.
These trials will be public, but that is usually limited to a few dozen people. The journalists can expect to be limited to a pad of paper and a couple of pencils in the courtroom because of security. If you want great theater, you will have to wait for a book or screenplay, because real trials are seldom gripping, or entertaining at the Federal level.
12 comments
…apparently Mr. Duff has never heard the typical pronouncements of an average run-of-the-mill District Attorney…
Good heavens, Mr. Duff, you certainly do show your ignorance of how federal court works readily. Any lawyer who tried to do a dog and pony show on the court house steps would swiftly be transported to the judge’s chambers and handed a gag order prohibiting him from making any public statements for the duration of the trial, as well as being handed a citation by the U.S. Marshall’s Service for misuse of federal property (the courthouse steps are allowed to be used only for entrance and exit from the courthouse, and not for any other public purpose). Where do you get your information about how federal courts work — from television?
Here is a hint about television, Mr. Duff. It’s not real. It’s fiction. Those of us who write such things often write things we know are not true in order to meet dramatic needs of the moment. I once wrote a scene where a medical examiner for the Santa Clara County Coroner’s Office pulls a body out of receptacle in a viewing room and shows it to a teenage girl for identification purposes. The problem: The SCCC has no viewing room and no storage facilities, it contracts with local hospitals for storage of corpses in their own morgues prior to autopsy. That did not fit the dramatic needs of my fictional narrative, so I made something up. Horrors, who could have known that fiction is not real? Will the revelations never cease ;)?
The defense team will use those pronouncements, probably to request a change of venue to some courtroom in the middle of nowhere, like the capital of New York State that no one can remember, which would defeat the entire purpose of having a world stage, because foreign journalists could spend months locating Albany.
Federal judges receive lifetime appointments and are sovereign within their domain. You annoy them at your own peril.
If the accused intends to plead guilty and wants the death penalty, almost everything will occur outside of the public courtroom, and the only public forum will be the sentencing hearing.
The US Attorney’s office in NYC is staffed primarily with veteran professional prosecutors, and the case will likely be assigned to a senior judge, so I’m afraid it will provide little drama for the masses.
If they tried it in a state court that permitted video cameras, there might be something to replace the BOOK TOUR, but I don’t see it. They try heavyweight cases all the time in New York, and they are rarely covered.
Yes, we are literal minded because that is the real world, so we are aware that Holder is not the prosecutor in this case and it hasn’t been assigned to a courtroom yet, so there is no judge to rule on his conduct.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed has been reported as saying multiple times that he wants to be a martyr and intends to plead guilty and demand the death sentence. If the defendant intends to plead guilty, the trial does rather become a foregone conclusion.
He is currently being represented by a career military attorney, and that responsibility will shift to a career Federal public defender with experience in death penalty cases. While someone might like to hire a high-voltage Muslim attorney to represent KSM, there is no indication that the defendant is at all interested. Getting carried away in a Federal courtroom is a quick path to disbarment and poverty, so it is unlikely that many would apply, although there are a number of good, solid attorneys who happen to be Muslims, in the US. We are a multi-cultural society, no matter what the wingnuts may think. The civil attorney for the county where I worked in New York state was a Lebanese Muslim, and that was a couple of decades ago.
A trial at the state level can get dramatic, but the Federal courts frown, severely, on that sort of thing. There is no end date on a contempt charge, you are in jail until the judge decides to release you, and that tends to reduce bad behavior in Federal cases.
You watch too much television. You really should cut down.
Mr. Duff apparently lives in an alternate universe where what he sees on television is real, rather than being lies that people like myself make up for dramatic purposes (it’s called FICTION, doh). It is sad, really, how someone can become so unmoored from reality as to believe that courtroom scenes in a television drama in any way resemble actual court proceedings. Actual court proceedings are deathly dull and defense attorneys typically do their best to keep their clients out of the paper, rather than attempting to grandstand to get publicity. That makes poor drama so people like me “pop it up” to make it more exciting. But it’s fiction. It’s not real. You’d expect a supposed adult to know that, but Mr. Duff appears to not know that.
And for the record, Mr. Duff, our local coroner’s office not only possesses no storage facilities of its own for corpses, but never has the family members view the actual corpse either. That bit of scenery you see on almost every “cop show”? Utter balderdash. The family gets to view photographs to identify their loved one. But how can you build dramatic tension around viewing a photograph? You can’t. So we, well, lie. That’s why it’s called crime FICTION — because it’s not REAL. SIIIIIIGH!
– Badtux the Fiction Penguin
I would, just once, like to see a coroner’s/medical examiner’s facility that wasn’t that pea institutional green with the “battleship” linoleum on the floor. A window? The only time the ME’s office came up at a county budget hearing was because they had a metallic blue van instead of black. The commission wanted the guy to have it painted. He bought it because it was cheap, as some jurisdiction had ordered too many, and the ME was not going to spend the money to paint it.
The chemical odors in the place would gag a maggot and some clown put all of the official vehicle parking for the Health Department at their “delivery entrance”, so you couldn’t avoid it.
The other fraud is defendants taking the stand. I only saw it once in ten years, and it was over the objections of the defense attorney, as the guy’s testimony really hurt the defense, but the guy was truly arrogant and thought he could sweet talk the pensioners on the jury. Defense attorneys don’t want their client talking to anyone but them, and if they say anything to the media, it will be the standard “the prosecution doesn’t have a case.”
Local DAs will talk to the media because they are often elected, and want all of the free media exposure they can get, but it doesn’t work that way on the Federal level. The pros, like Patrick Fitzgerald will hold a press conference after the verdict is in, but nothing until then. Not very exciting really.
If you are so terrified of words, why did you bother to learn to read?
To get a transcript of anything they may say will cost thousands of dollars, so I wouldn’t expect it will be widely disseminated, and what in hell are you afraid is going to be the result?
They are going to say the US foreign policy in the Mid East has sucked forever, and anyone paying attention already knows that. The US created al Qaeda by funding these whackos to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. That isn’t exactly news. Their “terrorist” madrassas are funded by the Saudis and many of the textbooks were printed by the University of Nebraska, Omaha. That is established fact.
I didn’t stop shopping in London when the IRA was blowing people up, so why would I care what someone says in a courtroom in New York to an audience of under 100 people?
You “conservatives” don’t seem to have much in the way of courage, if these guys scare you. I’m not giving up on the rule of law or the Constitution because someone threatens to bad mouth US foreign policy.
What part of no video and no audio recordings in the Federal courtroom don’t you understand? There will be a typed transcript of the trial and copies cost in the thousands. There are under 100 people in a standard courtroom.
What the hell is your problem? What do you think these people can say that hasn’t already been said?
Why do you think that anything coming from a courtroom is going to be more powerful that the scenes coming out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan?
How would the words in a courtroom have more power that the pictures from the Beirut suburbs or the Gaza Strip after Israeli air raids?
If you put the blanket over your head, there are rumors that the bogeyman can’t get you.
Sorry to belabor the obvious Bryan, but he’s a complete fool. You know these GOP stooges will *NEVER* allow a mere fact to get in the way of their rabid unfounded fantasies and *bogyman under the bed* terror.
Still… It is your blog, and I’d never stand in the way of your fun. Besides… I’d rather you blow off steam here than outside with your Remington or something m8! 😉 😆
And who knows… You may win over some visitors when they compare your logic and facts to the oppositions irrational bed-wetting fantasies. 🙂
I’ve been at a hearing where the defendant was in a caged helmet to prevent him from biting people. so I just don’t get the fear over these guys.
They are going to talk? Hell, have none of these people ever seen a debate in Congress or question time in anyone’s Parliament? The South Koreans have melees on a regular basis. At about half of these things you expect a guy in black shorts to jump up waving red and yellow cards, or a guy in a bowtie telling people to go back to their corner. Assaults with canes were once a regular feature of the US Congress in the 19th century.
These guys are threatening to make speeches in languages that almost no one in the US understands, and that is supposed to be justification for suspending the rule of law, and the US Constitution. It is a surreal argument.
Suspending the rule of law… I can’t help feeling that’s the point of the whole exercise. America is all about due process of law, or it is about nothing. If we are willing to sacrifice that just to get at some scary dudes wielding bombs, we are nothing. But if those scary dudes are wielding merely words, and we sacrifice due process merely to shut them up, we are worse than nothing: we are cowards.
I’ve said it often, and I’ll say it again: Americans should be willing to risk the violence of terrorists in order to assert our rights, our freedoms and our commitment to the law. Yes, it’s that simple. Sometimes we’re going to be attacked, and sometimes we’re going to be blown up or hit with airplanes or whatever terror the terrorists can think of and execute… but that’s a chance we must be willing to take, a courage we must be willing to muster, in order to do justice to the legacy of our founders. If people like Duff don’t understand, or, worse yet, think we’re naive… why, then, I PITY them, for they will never know freedom from fear.
Sheep ask wolves to protect them from foxes and don’t understand the problem.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
That was true when Benjamin Franklin said over 200 years ago, and it is still true. If the law has no meaning, there is no safety. More Americans die in automobile accidents every six weeks that all of the “terrorist” attacks in US history. More Israelis die in automobile accidents every month, than all of the Hamas rockets have killed in this century. Both nations still drive cars, and neither suggests banning them.