CAMERAS PASS TRIAL COURT RUN

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 10, 1992                   TAG: 9202100117
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By GREG SCHNEIDER
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium
CAMERAS PASS TRIAL COURT RUN
A Senate committee overwhelmingly endorsed a bill Sunday to permanently allow television and still cameras in courtrooms all over Virginia.
Cameras have been permitted in eight jurisdictions, including Bedford County, on an experimental basis since 1987. Sunday's 14-1 vote by the Senate Courts of Justice Committee would make the practice official and extend it statewide.
The full Senate will tackle the issue today or Tuesday.
"Virginia led the way for democracy in this country; it's now time for it to catch up," Teresa Keller, a graduate student from Emory & Henry College who has been studying the issue nationwide, told the committee on Sunday.
Forty other states currently allow cameras in courtrooms, Keller said.
Despite a Virginia Supreme Court calling for an end to photography in court, no one spoke against the issue before the committee.
In fact, one of the first judges to try the experimental program spoke in favor of it.
"I'm probably more experienced with this project than any other circuit judge in Virginia . . . and my experience has generally been favorable with the experiment," said Circuit Judge William W. Sweeney of Bedford.
Sweeney polled jurors after every case during the experiment and found that 95 percent of them had no problems with the cameras, he said.
The clerk of the Bedford court, Carol Black, said that taping and photographing of trials tended to make the proceedings calmer, and that her local sheriff thought it helped keep the courtroom safer.
"I don't think it's affected the outcome" of any trials, Black said.
The major problem with cameras, Sweeney said, is that news reports tend to feature only a few dramatic moments of testimony. He said coverage would be more valuable if it showed entire trials.
But the judge and a spokesman for the Virginia Bar Association said the law is written to safeguard against abuses. A judge can bar cameras at any time, for instance, and visual coverage is never allowed in juvenile, divorce or sexual assault cases.
The William Kennedy Smith rape trial, one senator said, could not have been aired in Virginia.

Keywords:
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by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB