My Court Stenography-To-Text Project
In the comment section of my article Too Many Murder Confessions Are Coerced False Confessions a reader asked me to explain in what way was I involved in the legal system to have experienced the cases I was describing. I responded:
I am not an attorney nor a paralegal.
The answer requires at least a half dozen full blown articles. I will start a new category to contain my posts which will be called 'My Justice Experience.'
For now let me briefly respond: I was directly involved in either observing the cases sitting in the courtroom, helping the defendants in filing the cases pro se, or discussing and then advising their cases with mucho hundreds of convicts in person in addition to researching false-convictions and prosecutorial misconduct on my own.
In addition, I have been in Grand Jury rooms a number of times, personally witnessed prosecutorial witness tampering by a US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
In addition, I was contracted in the early 1990s to help develop a system to turn stenographic court records into readable English which put me contact with court stenographers who gave me an insight into court proceedings that cannot be obtained by merely observing a trial.
I have even prepared a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in 1990 for a convict in Federal prison.
I have advised hundreds of friends regarding wills, bankruptcies, divorces, etc.
My father was a lawyer in Poland who also gave me interesting insights into the legal system in other countries.
My experience with court stenography will be the inaugural article for that new category My Justice Experience.
I briefly touched on that experience in my article Zimmerman Jury Verdict Shows that State Attorney Angela Corey is a Corrupt, Dangerous idiot:
Back in 1992 I was hired by a friend to write a software program to convert court reporters' stenotypic gobbledygook into readable English so as to make court transcriptions more readily and more cheaply available. This required me to attend hundreds and hundreds of trials and interview as many court stenographers. I have read almost a thousand civil and criminal court transcripts...
Sadly his death after a year of work killed the project and at that time I was not in a financial position to continue the effort on my own. Today, there are stenotype machines that employ computer-aided transcription software that converts stenotype shorthand to text in real time. However, my model would have kept the Steno paper flowing since my theory on everything assumes that Murphy, of Murphy's Law, was an optimist. Last year, for example, a convicted Florida murderer received a new trial because of a lack of steno-paper (1).
Many courts, in order to save money, are pushing to replace stenographers with digital recorders instead. However, based on my experience, this would be a big mistake and would not serve justice. Here are a few examples of the problems in using only electronic recording:
- The speech is inaudible because the speaker is too far from the microphone. The judge may hear what is being said but does not realize it and so does not order the speaker to repeat what was said or to speak louder. A steno-typist, if she does not hear what is being said, asks for the material to be repeated.
- The speech is undecipherable because two or more people are speaking at once. Depending on the distance between the speakers and the microphone and the distance between the speakers and the judge, the judge may understand what is being said, while someone listening to the taped version cannot understand at all. A steno-typist, if she cannot properly ascribe the different texts to the appropriate speakers, will ask for each one to repeat their speech.
- The speech is inaudible because the speaker, though speaking too low for the microphone may be facing the judge as he speaks so that the judge hears his testimony. If he is also a facing a human steno-typist, his testimony will be properly recorded. If she cannot hear, she will ask the witness to speak louder.
- The speech is not understandable because accented speech may sound unintelligible on tape. A court reporter watching a witness' lips move will have an immediate guide as to what the speaker is saying. A digital recording, unless accompanied by a video focusing on the witness' face, cannot ex post facto decipher what was actually said.
- Digital recordings do not take gestures into account. A witness may inaudibly say, "Yes," while nodding his head which may mislead a judge into believing it was recorded properly but the taped transcript will only have a murmur. A steno-typist will accurately record such instances; however if she cannot determine what was muttered, she can stop the witness and ask for a clear audible response.
A digital recording device cannot stop witnesses who talk too fast, too quietly, or at the same time as others in the courtroom. Sure, the judge can order all witnesses to repeat everything they say twice just to be sure it is being properly recorded but what jury can sit through that?
But you may wonder, is this really a problem? How many instances of these kinds of errors can there be in a trial without a stenographer? I know of a murder case where there were 261 such instances of omissions (2) in a tape-only proceeding.
If you are ever in a murder trial, insist that your lawyer move the court to order all court proceedings recorded by a human stenographer. Without that, on appeal, even pointing out a thousand inaudible instances in the tape version will not overturn your conviction unless you can demonstratively show prejudice resulting from the missing or mumbled portions.
And don't get me started on foreign language witnesses who require translators. That will require a post of its own.
In my numerous articles opposing the death penalty, my objections were focused on police misconduct, prosecutorial lies, witnesses' mis-identifications, informants' false testimonies, and bored and misinformed juries. Let us now add digitally-recorded court proceedings which make accurately recorded court transcripts less useful on appeals.
ENDNOTES
(1):
ABC News, Stenographer Error Gives Convicted Florida Murderer New Trial
A Florida man convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison will get a new trial, all thanks to a court stenographer who erased the entire transcript of his murder trial.
Randy Chaviano, 26, of Hialeah, Fla., was convicted by a jury in July 2009 of fatally shooting Charles Acosta, who came to his apartment to buy drugs.
Chaviano appealed his conviction to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami. When it was discovered that hardly any transcripts of his trial proceedings existed, the court last week threw out his conviction and life sentence, and ordered that he get an entirely new chance to go before jurors.
Any traces of Chaviano’s trial all but disappeared from the Miami-Dade courthouse’s records, officials say, because the court reporter for the case, Terlesa Cowart, failed to capture the trial on paper.
Cowart, a courts spokeswoman told the Miami Herald, put the trial transcript on an internal disc instead, and then erased the data from the stenography machine’s memory disc.
She did back the disk up on her computer, but a virus on the computer later erased all of her notes. All that remained was a transcript of one pretrial hearing and the trial’s closing arguments.
“The rest is lost forever,” Chaviano’s attorney, Harvey Sepler, wrote in court documents.
For now, court stenographers in Miami-Dade are required to use machines that capture their work both on paper and the internal disc used by Cowart.
(2):
Google Scholar, State v. DePew, 38 Ohio St. 3d 275 - Ohio: Supreme Court 1988
In Proposition of Law IV, appellant contends that the trial court erred to his prejudice by failing to require the recording of the proceedings by stenography.[1] Instead, the entire trial was tape recorded and later transcribed. Appellant asserts that since the record contains two hundred sixty one instances of words or phrases marked "inaudible," "no audible response," or "unclear," he has been deprived of the complete record to which he is entitled for an effective appeal.
