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Virtual courts and putting 'Summary' back into 'Summary Justice': Merely brief, or unjust?
... Whilst it is accepted by some that technology holds the potential to improve the court system and access to justice (Rowden, 2013), it is important to heed Widdison's warning that "whilst […] IT is morally neutral, our management, mismanagement or non-management of it is not" (Donoghue, 2017(Donoghue, , p. 1024. ...
... The current court reform programme's stated vision is to "modernise and upgrade the justice system so that it works even better for everyone, from judges and legal professionals, to witnesses, litigants, and the vulnerable victims of crime" (HMCTS, 2018). However, concerns have continued to be raised that both lay client participation and the importance of the built environment (Rowden, 2013) are being overlooked in favour of "achieving reductions in expenditure and meeting fiscal imperatives" (Donoghue, 2017(Donoghue, , p. 1024). The Justice Committee (2019) has also recently warned that insufficient steps have been taken "to address the needs of vulnerable users" (p. ...
... There were also reports of parents engaging in emergency proceedings to remove their children by calling in from the side of the motorway and numerous difficulties with clients having insufficient phone credit or wifi data (Ryan, Harker and Rothera, 2020a). The report echoed previous reservations (Rowden, 2013;Donoghue, 2017) The follow-up report published in October 2020 reiterated "concern about the difficulty of creating an empathetic and supportive environment when hearings are held remotely" (Ryan, Harker and Rothera, 2020b, p. 19). ...
This paper explores the repercussions of the virtual hearings within the context of socioeconomic inequality in the justice system. Following the imposition of ‘lockdown’ conditions in the UK in March 2020, the Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) rapidly introduced an online court system resulting in thousands of hearings being swiftly transferred onto audio or video-calling platforms. This study is based on interviews with six barristers and solicitors practising in the criminal and family courts, focusing on what the online court experience can reveal about the disparity in socioeconomic status between those judging and those being judged. Conducting a thematic analysis of the interview data, I argue that the disruption to the courtroom dynamics caused by online hearings highlights tacit functions of the lawyer’s role in supporting their clients to navigate the daunting court experience and comply with courtroom customs. I ultimately conclude that concerns regarding the loss of solemnity of proceedings reveal assumptions of both the traditional and virtual court environment and suggest that further research is needed before committing to permanent technology reforms.
... This study underlines the importance of acknowledging that technology is not transparent (Lanzara, 2010) and, far from being a neutral insertion, its use fundamentally alters the nature of court proceedings (Rowden, 2013). That videolink appearances disrupt or alter experts' performances should trouble experts and those who call them. ...
This article reports on empirical research conducted into the use of audiovisual links (videolinks) to take expert testimony in jury trials. Studies reveal ambivalent attitudes to court use of videolink, with most previous research focussed on its use for vulnerable witnesses and defendants. Our study finds there are issues unique to expert witnesses appearing by videolink, such as compromised ability to gesture and interact with exhibits and demonstrative tools, and reductions in availability of feedback to gauge juror understanding. Overall, the use of videolinks adds an additional cognitive load to the task of giving expert evidence. While many of these issues might be addressed through environmental or technological improvements, we argue this research has broader ramifications for expert witnesses and the courts. The use of videolinks for taking expert evidence exposes the contingent nature of expertise and the cultural scaffolding inherent in its construction. In reflecting on the implications of these findings, and on the way that reliability, credibility and expertise are defined and established in court, we suggest a more critical engagement with the relationship between content and mode of delivery by stakeholders.
... The significance of judicial space also lies in the fact that its ornamental, oratorical and architectural features lead to semiotics of law within courtroom space [15,25,87]. Rowden [66] has argued that judicial space is not a 27 This interpretation can be said to be the result of the Habeas Corpus case, (ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla AIR 1976 SC 1207) where the SCI pronounced the pro-government judgment with 4:1 majority. 28 Kannabiran [33] has also argued regarding the placing of a Manu statue in the precincts of the Rajasthan High Court and the controversy around it that whether statues have only decorative value or do they also symbolise and represent something. ...
The neutrality of the art and architecture of courtrooms and courthouses has dominated the public perception in the Indian context. The courtroom design and the visual artistic elements present within these judicial places have very often been considered to be insignificant to the notions of law and justice that they reflect. As art and architecture present certain historical narratives, reflect political allegories and have significant impact on the perceptions of their viewers, they have critical socio-political ramifications. This makes it pertinent to explore them and investigate the paradox of their deployment and interpretation in today’s increasingly mediatized world. Through an ethnographic study of the Supreme Court of India, this paper interprets its art and architecture, and, the symbolism and semiotics reflected through them. Arguing against their neutrality and insignificance, the paper demonstrates how they reflect nationalism, certain ideologies and power-space dynamics. It further argues that they act as evidence of political metaphors related to justice, power and democracy. With a conversation between law, architecture and semiotics, the paper investigates the historical and spatial dimensions of its architecture and artistic elements. Mapping the Court’s architectural elements, I examine how the visual representation of ‘justice as virtue’ finds translation in its design through transfer of certain images, including the image of the ‘scales of justice’, into it, while absenting the notion of ‘justice as struggle’—to contemplate on how legal architecture gives evidence to the vexed relationship between law and justice and also of the break from the colonial past
... Many countries have adopted it, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands (Lanzara and Patriotta, 2001;Lederer, 2005;Wallace, 2008;Henning and Ng, 2009). Some publications (Babcock and Johansen, 2011;Biolley, 2013;Bossan, 2011;Braun, 2013;Danet, 2010;Diamond et al., 2010;Dumoulin and Licoppe, 2013;Gertner, 2004;Garofano, 2007;Henning and Ng, 2009;Kodek, 2012;Rowden, 2013;Salyzyn, 2012;Wallace, 2008) have identified several major areas of concern with the use of videoconferencing, in particular in the field of criminal law (Dumoulin and Licoppe, 2016: 315-318). ...
Filming and transmitting hearings on the one hand, and conducting them by videoconferencing on the other, are generally addressed through different issues and analytical lenses. In this paper we have used the French experience to show that, in fact, the two activities have some features in common. We have tried to highlight the real but discreet empirical connections between them in France and to underscore a few convergent issues with regard to the concept of a trial and the various conceptions of both presence at and participation in a hearing, as well as of publicness.
This supplement to the ‘Building Trust in the Digital Era: Achieving Scotland’s Aspirations as an Ethical Digital Nation’ Report is a collection of case studies provided by a group of experts from a range of backgrounds. These case study contributions have fed into the core report content, helping to position the ethical
challenges relating to digital innovation across a range of sectors. This supplement has been structured to reflect the chapters in the ‘Building Trust in the Digital Era’ report and case studies have been positioned under the chapter that they have primarily contributed to.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in the use of video-mediated justice practices. However, such developments have already been transforming justice over the course of the previous 20 years. Scholars and legal professinals have expressed concerns over how remote appearance in court impacts perceptions of the accused. In this article, we consider some of these concerns and explore the concept of the ‘distributed court’ as a potential remedy. Unlike traditional video appearance in court, where a defendant participates remotely while all other players are co-located in the same courtroom, in a distributed court all participants meet in a shared virtual space. Such a configuration is similar to the virtual courts developed worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on a reimagining of co-presence from scholars in the sociology of technology to elaborate the concept of the distributed court. We then present the results of a mock jury study that examines how jurors respond to variations in court technology configurations. We find that appearing by video does not impact the likelihood of a guilty verdict. Rather, a defendant appearing alone in a dock seems to be the most prejudicial location. We find that a distributed court can communicate equality and produce a shared experience of remote participation. We conclude with a discussion of how this research can inform best practice in a future where a significant number of criminal hearings are likely to continue in a virtual format.
The shift towards dispute resolution taking place outside traditional legal arenas is fundamentally changing the relationship between space and law, presenting legal geography with pressing new research opportunities. This paper explores how the emerging geographies of publicness, materiality, access to justice and communication shed light on the consequences of alternative and online dispute resolution. Crucially, these consequences raise urgent interdisciplinary questions for geography and law. We set out these questions and suggest that legal geography will be best placed to address them by working through some of the practical, applied ramifications of its concepts and perspectives.
This chapter describes the participatory rights of a defendant in domestic criminal proceedings in England and Wales in both the pre-trial and trial period. The chapter also considers the law in England and Wales relating to trials in absentia, before considering participatory rights at a transnational level. As I outline in this chapter, recent policy developments in England and Wales have resulted in a number of “efficiency” initiatives theoretically designed to expedite decision making but which have resulted in the potential undermining of participatory rights for a defendant. In addition, recent changes to legal aid have made it increasingly difficult for individuals to access legal representation at different stages of the criminal process. Finally, and most significantly, the United Kingdom remains in a transitional period post “Brexit” referendum in terms of its criminal justice arrangements. The Conservative government made the repealing of the Human Rights Act and its replacement with a British Bill of Rights one of their election policies and although this has not yet materialised (indeed, it has been repeatedly delayed), as of January 2018 parliament has voted not to retain the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in domestic law when it leaves the EU. This context means that many questions of participatory rights, particularly those linked to the future of the Human Rights Act, therefore remain unresolved and a source of concern.
Judges perform an important role on behalf of society, as impartial decision-makers; interpreting and applying the law, presiding over courtrooms and ensuring a fair trial. The image of the judge, that is the way that they are viewed culturally, reinforces their role, by emphasizing their authority and neutrality, and thus supporting the legitimacy of the court as an institution. Increasingly, however, judges are performing their roles using videoconferencing, where either they, or other participants, are physically located outside the courtroom. Reporting on a three-year empirical study on the use of videolinks in Australian courts, this paper argues that the introduction of videoconferencing technologies in court has had a profound impact on the production, management and consumption of judicial images, and that has implications for the role of the judge. We contend that videolinks challenge cultural assumptions about both how the role of the judge is performed, and what the image of the judge should be. We argue that increased attention needs to be given to the crafting of the image of the judge received on the video link, so as to achieve greater congruence between that image and the role of the judge. The judicial role itself may need to encompass increased awareness of, and responsibility for, that task
This report examines the spatiality of court processes, connecting interdisciplinary work that has considered the physical processes of trials with geographical work that has deepened our understanding of the substance and properties of the material world. The specific focus of this discussion is the built materiality of courts, tracing the emergence of work on the nature of trial spaces, court architecture and the arrangement of courtrooms. Rather than a review of progress in an already-defined intellectual field, I am bringing together an interdisciplinary set of works with the aim of tracing the future pathways for work on the geography of trials.
Sweeping changes are being introduced into the lower-tier magistrates' courts in England and Wales in efforts to modernise the system and speed up case processing. They concentrate on delivering prompt justice within a modern, efficient and technologically advanced system. But these transformations are fundamentally changing the way justice is delivered. This book analyses criminal court streamlining processes and argues that there are areas where due process protections are being undermined. Transforming Summary Justice reports empirical research carried out with lay magistrates and criminal justice professionals. Views and experiences drawn from magistrates are valuable because of the central role they perform in lower court justice. Further, magistrates provide a wider understanding of the context in which the lower criminal courts operate and enable a critical appraisal of this unique style of 'lay justice'. This book is directed at students of criminology, criminal justice and socio-legal studies, who will find the debates stimulating and useful to engage with in contemporary analyses of criminal court justice. It will also be of interest to justice and legal professionals who are seeing swingeing alterations to the field in which they work. The book will have appeal in other common-law jurisdictions, where similar modifications to lower court justice are occurring, and also across Europe, where lay involvement in legal decision-making is being debated and becoming accepted practice.
In most common law jurisdictions worldwide, an offender’s remorse is a mitigating factor in sentencing. It matters whether or not a person who has committed a crime is truly sorry for what they have done. And yet how judges evaluate such expressions is unclear. Drawing on 18 interviews with judges in the New South Wales criminal justice system in Australia, this article examines the status of offenders’ live, sworn evidence in the judiciary’s assessment of offenders’ remorse. These interviews with the judiciary reveal that remorse assessment often operates beyond semiotic, representational paradigms (such as ‘demeanour assessment’) and instead works, in experiential terms, as a feeling. When it comes to offenders getting into the witness box and speaking of their remorse, it seems that sometimes something gets felt by judges at the level of embodied affect that then enables them to declare: ‘This person is remorseful.’
The administration of ‘summary’ justice in the lower criminal courts in England and Wales is undergoing significant transformation.
Broadly, this sits within the desire to create a modernized and more streamlined system. But, criminal justice scholars state
‘swift justice’ is not necessarily fair justice, and ‘procedural due process’ might be challenged by objectives of economics
and speed. This paper centres on two areas of change—the expanded role of the police in prosecutorial decision making and
the introduction of ‘virtual courts’ where accused defendants appear via video link from police stations to the criminal courts.
It is argued these two alterations call into question fundamental principles of procedural due process.
Recent theories of knowledge management have offered a functionalist understanding of knowledge creating dynamics in organizations. Their focus is on the role of knowledge assets as a determinant of competitive performance. However, the presupposition that knowledge can be managed or treated as an objective commodity seems to overlook the highly interactive, provisional and controversial nature of knowledge-oriented phenomena in organizations. By deviating from the mainstream, we conduct a phenomenological inquiry into knowledge making within the setting of courtroom trials. Evidence is provided by in-depth case studies carried out in six Italian courtrooms adopting videocassette recording (VCR) technology as a tool for recording and storing the proceedings of criminal trials. The behavioural responses of courtroom actors confronted by the intrusion of an alien technology in a highly institutionalized and resilient setting are particularly relevant for the study of knowledge in organizations. They reveal the highly controversial, pasted up and medium-specific features of organizational and professional knowledge systems. Rather than being the product of smooth conversion processes, knowledge in organizations is the outcome of inquiry, controversy and bricolage, resilient as a whole, but subject to local disputes, experiments and reassembling. Based on the findings of the cases, our account points towards a view of organizational knowledge as a dynamic, heterogeneous ‘assemblage’ characterized by ongoing transformations and reconfigurations.
Accounts of virtual organization have been couched in terms of concepts and metaphors that do not inherit from the features of a coherent theory of virtuality. Arguing that virtuality is inherent in modernity, this article focuses on three major drivers behind the current wave of virtualization of organizational work practices to explore the interplay of the virtual and the concrete. Using three vignettes as an illustration, the article discusses how organizations, through writing, make the presence of humans contingent; through technology, displace human action into artifacts, machines, or electronic devices; and through institutions, virtualize (conflicting and sometimes collaborative) human relations and proximal encounters. However, the process of virtualization does not only deterritorialize existing skills and relations, but it also generates new skills, which in their turn impose a reterritorialization process.
This article reports the results of an ethnographic study of court hearings in which participants are distributed across two distant sites, connected by videoconference. It focuses on the particulars of opening sequences in such mediated settings, and discusses in detail a “curious case,” in which the presiding judge did not open the hearing by the traditional, formulaic speech act (“The hearing is now open. You may be seated.”). Through a combination of ethnographic observation and sequential analysis, we show how the production of such an expected institutional speech act in courtroom hearings may have been made irrelevant at the sequential slot in which one might have expected its performance. What such a speech act does in a given activity-embedded sequential setting depends on and reveals the particular interplay of technology, talk- and gesture-in-interaction, and activity that is relevant to the ongoing production of a proper beginning for a court hearing conducted at a distance.
With increasing frequency, witnesses who formerly could only appear in court via deposition transcripts and videotapes now testify live from remote locations via videoconferencing. For many people, the idea of filming testimony evokes concerns about attorneys manipulating a witness's appearance to affect the witness's credibility. For others, the thought of a witness appearing "live via satellite" poses a threat to the very sanctity of the courtroom. In this Comment, Michael Roth examines issues of law and policy raised by introducing videoconferencing technology to trial proceedings. Roth provides a background of the technology and an overview of its current uses in the judicial system. He then looks at the concept of demeanor testimony and examines how media theorists suggest both the technology itself and production techniques can affect perceptions of a witness's demeanor. Roth argues that in light of empirical studies refuting the efficacy of demeanor as an indicator of truthfulness and current trial practices that distort witnesses' credibility, remote witness testimony should not be separately regulated. He concludes that videoconferencing should either be considered an additional tool in the advocate's repertoire of trial tactics, or it should invite a reevaluation of the advocate's role in our adversarial system.
This article examines the implications of allowing witnesses to give evidence in trials from other locations through the medium of 'live link'. Academic commentary on this technological aid has to date focused on the impact it has on the defendant's right to cross-examine or the ability to judge demeanour. Whilst these issues are important, this essay focuses on a less commented on implication of live link; its impact on our conception of where and how adjudication takes place. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which the courtroom as the prime site of legal practice is in danger of being dematerialized and the effect this is likely to have on the legitimacy of the trial as an authentic legal and public ritual.
Objective:
To describe the use of videoconferencing that is providing a specialist forensic service to remote parts of Western Australia.
Conclusions:
Court liaison has been shown to be an effective intervention for people with mental illness within the justice system. Most such programmes occur within metropolitan areas in Australia. Videoconferencing facilitates the provision of specialized forensic services to courts in remote parts of Australia.