Two opposing lawyers are squaring off in a case before Cook County Circuit Judge Stephen A. Schiller.
As always, Schiller’s docket is painfully full. This case has been in and out of court for months, and Schiller has made dozens of rulings as it has moved ponderously along.
One of the lawyers suddenly dredges up a ruling Schiller made many weeks ago. As the judge tries to recall it, both attorneys stand before him contentiously arguing what the gist of the ruling was. Schiller decides to see for himself.
He taps into his laptop computer on the bench and calls up his files on the case. What he needs is right there, and he is instantly able to decide the issue and move the trial along.
“The computer,” he says later, happily, “gives me the ability to find things very fast, to refresh my recollections. I can’t remember everything. It saves a lot of time.”
Courtrooms are changing. We are in the emerging era of the wired court, even if it’s only arriving in fits and starts.
Lawyers bring laptops to lay out their case. Jurors don infrared headsets to hear better. Courtroom computer screens, in some instances, carry instantly transcribed testimony. The technique is known as “realtime” and works like closed-caption TV for jurors with hearing problems.
“Times change,” says Chief Judge Marvin E. Aspen of the U.S. District Court in Chicago, a polished courtroom veteran. “When I started I wrote in longhand or dictated. Now it’s hard to find an assistant who takes dictation.
“I’ve learned to use the computer and I send my own e-mail. When I wanted to reach the other judges, I’d have to make 27 phone calls and they’d call back. Now I send a message on the computer and in two minutes they’ve all responded.”
At Chicago-Kent College of Law, a model teaching court is named for Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, who at 92 is a senior federal court judge.
The Marovitz courtroom looks typical, but isn’t. It’s loaded with spaceage data linkups and hidden cables, realtime capacity, push-buttons and videotaping gear. “The most advanced courtroom in Chicago,” says spokeswoman Gretchen Van Dam.
But wiring isn’t all there is to it. The courtroom has movable furniture and easy wheelchair access. The wired court is making common cause with the accessible court.
Change long time in coming
We are a considerable distance from the days when court reporters, using shorthand, took it all down by pen and people in wheelchairs had to be hoisted up the front steps of the courthouse. “The law changes very slowly and so do courtrooms,” says Chicago architect Walter H. Sobel, a noted consultant on courthouse design.
They do change though. The Cook County court system seldom has been known for progress. But it, too, now employs realtime when needed.
A trial is under way, say. The court reporter is taking it all down in phonetic coding on a stenograph machine. The computer translates it back into standard English and instantly puts it on the computer screen, at cyberspeed.
In that way, a juror or other participant in the case can keep up with the spoken word even if he can’t hear it. Judges and lawyers can cut down on notetaking, if they wish, because the material is on their screen and can be called up at any time.
The O.J. Simpson trial, that high-tech extravaganza, used realtime. It’s expensive to install, but it’s no mere utopian gimmick.
Buoyant Linda Valentino oversees Cook County’s official court reporters, and calls realtime “a boon for the hearing-impaired.
“Anyone can be a juror now,” she says.
That, of course, isn’t quite true. But common sense and wiring, combined with federal equal-access laws, are opening courtrooms to people who used to feel left out.
Two of the 10 new Cook County courtrooms in Daley Center have push-button wheelchair lifts. Judge Daniel J. Sullivan, who is in a wheelchair himself, uses one of the courts. Meanwhile, DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton, built in the early 1990s, is fully accessible, says Deputy Court Administrator Dan Amati.
U.S. District Court, 219 S. Dearborn St. in the Dirksen Building, boasts a showcase courtroom with plug-in hearing devices, movable furniture and 12-channel capacity for language interpreters. It also has a computer mixing chamber near the bench.
Now the District Court is equipping all of its bigger courtrooms with infrared hearing amplifiers.
“The disabled are demanding their right to serve,” notes Henry H. Perritt Jr., dean at Chicago-Kent.
Circuit Court labors under a backlog of 25,000 cases in its civil branch alone. Wiring can’t do much about that, or erase Chicago’s legendary history of courtroom scandalsand justice gone astray. Human nature still is the engine of courtroom drama.
“The computer is most useful in cases with a large number of documents,” says Chief Circuit Court Judge Donald O’Connell, referring particularly to virtually unmanageable lawsuits where lawyers cart in 300,000 or 400,000 records, with indexing to match.
In two cases, O’Connell won special clearance from the Illinois Supreme Court to pool documents in a central computer file. Both sides could pull up records easily, and the lawyers paid a fee for the service.
Computer animation is familiar in TV commercials. It’s also familiar in Circuit Court, where it’s used, for example, to diagram the dynamics in an accident case involving an overturned car. The resulting video is shown to the jury.
Enough judges are computer-minded so that the Cook County court system is doubling its supply of laptops. All court clerks have desktop terminals to enter case summaries, says Clerk of the Circuit Court Aurelia Pucinski.
Security is a concern
She points out, though, that as electronics moves in, the security of court records becomes a source of controversy. O’Connell says he is satisfied that a safety wall is in place.
But if courtrooms are changing, so are the courthouses themselves. In U.S. District Court, Judge Aspen is sentimental enough to cherish a photo of the domed federal courthouse razed in 1965.
Al Capone was convicted there. The building swelled with marble and murals and mahogany and lorded it over Dearborn and Adams streets. It looked solid enough for eternal Rome, but was considered hard to “modernize.”
In the mid-1960s it all was rudely junked in favor of the Dirksen Building, a glassy power-tower pinstriped in black with not a mural in sight. The new building’s businesslike air turned out to be prophetic of courtroom change.
“Flexibility is the key,” says Paul J. Zinni, architect with the General Services Administration.
Now, however, the Dirksen Building itself will have to flex, and then some. Some $20 million worth of new-generation courtrooms are due to be carved out of office floors 12 and 13 in a massive root-canal job that is soon to get under way. Four of the eight courts will be two stories high.
To get it all done, an entire floor slab will be ripped out and tons of steel beams threaded in. Work crews then will build hidden support trusses. A similar feat was completed in 1994 on floors 14 and 15, with only a few cracks in the plaster.
Amid all the changes, some traditions hold firm. “No cameras” seems entrenched as federal court policy, and in Cook County Circuit Court as well. The Dirksen courts also cling to a traditional wood-paneled mien, but the general formula for new courts seems to be few flourishes and no daylight. “Restrained,” says architect Sobel.
He treasures an ornamental doorknob saved from the old federal building. When new courts try for that lost style now, it’s usually shaved thin. The court elevators in the remodeled State of Illinois Building, 160 N. LaSalle St., are lined with marble–an economical eighth of an inch thick.
But the most obvious change in courthouses is tightened security, starting with metal detectors. They can raise the alarm on a stray dime stuck in the seam of a back pocket.
Security will figure in the remaking of Dirksen floors 12 and 13, to assure elevator privacy for judges–and for prisoners.
In Chicago’s gloomy Criminal Courts Building, at 26th Street and California Avenue, remodeled courtrooms are cocooned under protective glass.
Some futurists speculate we can leave all the fuss behind by switching court routine into the Internet.
Not likely. “There always will be courtrooms,” says Judge Aspen.
