Now, as Frein stands trial in Pike County for allegedly killing state police Cpl. Byron K. Dickson II and wounding Trooper Alex T. Douglass in the Sept. 12, 2014, attack at the Blooming Grove barracks, public interest remains strong.
Yet the courthouse door is partially closed. Pennsylvania is among the states that continue to bar cameras from courtrooms. It does so even though the excuses for the ban have been eclipsed by technology, and obviated by vast experiences in more progressive states.
Opponents of courtroom cameras traditionally have employed two principal arguments: that the camera operation would be a distraction and that lawyers or witnesses might play to the cameras rather than to the court, in some cases.
The technology issue once was valid. But video technology long ago reached the point that it is like wallpaper — part of the environment.
As for the conduct of lawyers, witnesses, jurors and others in the courtroom, that is no less the province of the judge in a courtroom with cameras than in one without cameras.
On the federal side, the Supreme Court of the United States has authorized multiple experiments with cameras in district and appellate courts around the country. Most recently, arguments before District Judge James L. Robart in Washington state, which resulted in a rejection of President Donald Trump’s travel ban against residents of seven Muslim countries, were on live television. And the appeal at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco streamed live online.
Despite those and other successful demonstrations, the SCOTUS still refuses to authorize cameras in all federal courts.
It and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should recognize that it’s 2017, and that there is no valid excuse for limiting the broadest possible public access to the courtroom.
©2017 The Times-Tribune (Scranton, Pa.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
