Television coverage of the trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on the outdoor televisions at the Fox News headquarters in New York, March 29, 2021.HILARY SWIFT/The New York Times News Service
This will come as news to many who watched the televised trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, but the trial was never supposed to be on TV. In Minnesota, cameras are not allowed in courtrooms.
What happened in this instance was rare and made so by the COVID pandemic. Judge Peter Cahill made an assessment about the pandemic-era public access to the trial and decided that, under the circumstances, the public had the right to see the trial. Crucial to his decision was the fact that, in order to allow social-distancing in the courtroom, the public gallery had to be removed.
Chauvin’s lawyers were in favour of allowing TV cameras. The State Attorney’s Office in Minnesota was not. It argued that live TV coverage might intimidate witnesses and make some people reluctant to testify. Judge Cahill’s decision was to ensure great care was taken in how events in his courtroom were televised. Members of the Floyd family and witnesses under the age of 18 could not be shown without their advance consent. Cameras were prohibited from close-up shots of the defence and prosecution counsel tables until a verdict was reached and read. Cahill was also particularly careful and strict to ensure the faces of jurors could never be seen. At one point, he ordered that a plexiglass screen be moved because a juror’s face might be reflected on it.
The careful decision could be seen as monumentally important and should be a turning point in the ongoing debate about televising courtroom trials. While there was intense and international interest in the trial, the judge saw the issue as a matter of fairness and integrity being on display in a small courtroom in Hennepin County, Minn.
What he did was to drain the melodrama from the situation in the courtroom. The trial resulting from the killing of George Floyd was a landmark case – one that went to the heart of the racial divide in the U.S. and defined how America is seen around the world. If the proceedings had become histrionic because of the presence of TV cameras, an already fraught circumstance could have become disastrous.
There are many, many ways to approach the staging of the Chauvin trial and find meaning in it. One is to put it in the context of what is seen and what is understood. Because Floyd’s death was filmed, almost everyone in the world is familiar with it. As far as world was concerned, Chauvin pinned Floyd down for eight minutes and 46 seconds. The number “8:46” itself became a tool to convey the shocked reaction of people everywhere.
We all assumed we knew what had happened thanks to that 8:46 of footage. Yet it turned out, early in the trial, that prosecutors could show that Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. What you thought you saw was not precisely what happened – it was worse than that.
This point about perception must lead us to consider the more general matter of what we see when we see real trials unfold on TV. We live in a unique period in the context of perception. It seems everything is documented by camera – from police bodycams to ordinary people turning on their phones to bear witness to a shocking event. We make the assumption that, having seen the footage, we understand what happened.
Yet we also live in a time when what we’ve seen in the past is being reframed and rethought. A recent phenomenon on TV has been the re-examination of famous figures from the recent past who became notorious because of lurid TV coverage of legal proceedings in which they were involved.
Many shocking criminal trials have been televised in the U.S. since the 1970s. The list is long and includes the trials of Ted Bundy, the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson. Often what people remember about these trials is inexact. They forget how the trial was actually interpreted for viewers by TV commentators and pundits doing dramatically simplified analysis of courtroom theatrics.
What’s come under specific analysis is the handling of criminal cases involving women. Now we can look back and see how Lorena Bobbit and Casey Anthony were presented as deranged women – unstable, unreliable and, essentially, caricatures of dangerous women. The public bought into that image, because televised trials were allowed to morph into soap-opera entertainment.
There is a good reason why cameras are not allowed in courtrooms in Minnesota – and there is a very good reason why the trial of Derek Chauvin was an exception. But what should be taken from this courtroom drama is the good sense in making it restricted and respectful to everyone involved. There was enormous weight to the trial. Draining it of melodrama and theatrics was warranted and just, and should represent the future of televised trials.
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