What do the courts do?
• Most prevalent images of courts found in
news accounts and in other media are
misleading
– Implication is that what courts do is regularly have
trials …
– That trials are “normal”
Why trials?
• Coverage of courtroom activity is driven in
part by financial considerations about what
the audience wants to see and what will
produce market returns
• Only some court functions sell. Trials, which
often center on violent crime and feature
conflict, are appealing to the media.
Media images of courts
“For many in today’s world, mass media images are
their primary source of knowledge about law,
lawyers, and the legal system … Directly and
indirectly, the media paint a distorted image of the
courts. When portrayed indirectly as in the law
enforcement focused media, the courts are often
alluded to as soft on crime, easy on criminals, due
process-laden institutions that repeatedly release the
obviously guilty and dangerous. … When shown
directly, court officers are often more engaged in
fighting crime than in practicing law.”
-- Ray Surette (2007)
Caption: The US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, is the one court that
perhaps best symbolizes “justice” to citizens. Yet, the Court hears the
lowest amount of cases of all American courts, and only accepts
about 1% of the cases that are appealed to it.
Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission
• 5-4 decision overturning part of Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA),
commonly referred to as “McCain-Feingold”
law
• Media reactions to ruling very diverse
http://www.pscj.appstate.edu/media/citizensunited.html
• http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-252010/supreme-corp
Focus on state courts
• More media coverage of state courts and the
types of crime they deal with
– Accurate since most court activity is at state level
– But, implications of focus on street crime?
Caption: The great bulk of convictions for “serious crime” or felonies
occurs in state courts.
Focus on state courts
• In 2004, state courts convicted about 1.1
million adults of felonies.
– Most common convictions were for drug offenses
(34% of all convictions) and property crimes (29%
of all convictions). Only 18% of convictions in state
courts were for violent crimes, including only
8,400 murder and nonnegligent convictions (less
than 1% of the total convictions in state courts).
Focus on state courts
• Less than 75,000 people were convicted of
felonies.
– The most common convictions were for drug
offenses (34% of all convictions) and property
offenses (17% of all convictions). Less than 5% of
all convictions in federal courts were for violent
crimes.
The right to trial?
The right to trial?
• At the state level in 2004, 95% of convictions
were achieved through plea bargains. Further,
at the federal level in 2004, 96% of convictions
were achieved through plea bargains.
• Compare this with media coverage of courts
(adversarial)!
Caption: Citizens think of a courtroom as an adversarial process
where prosecutors and defense attorneys fight over the truth.
In fact, nearly all felony cases are settled outside the courtroom
when prosecutors and defense attorneys reach an agreement
on a sentence without trial through the plea bargaining process.
Caption: In 2006, 46% of criminal justice funding went to police,
followed by 32% for corrections, but only 22% for courts.
One outcome of this imbalance of spending is an inability to
hold trials for people accused of even serious crimes.
Reasons why even trials
are not fair
• Imbalance of power in the courts (prosecutors
have the power)
• Typical defense attorney is public defender
• Unrepresentative nature of courtroom
workgroups (low numbers of minorities)
High Profile Trials
(“Megacases”)
• Create misconception that trials are common
• Create misconception that power in courts
rests with defense attorneys
• Also create conception that there is a twotiered court system
Caption: The metaphor of the “wedding cake” applies to criminal trials
in the United States. The top layer, the least common and thus the
smallest, is meant to depict those rare high profile trials that usually
involve celebrities and/or heinous crimes. The bottom layer, the
largest and thus most common, is meant to represent the far more
common every day, routine cases such as misdemeanors.
Major Themes of
High Profile Trials
• Abuse of power – Cases where powerful people,
often politicians or even criminal justice personnel
have abused the power of their positions for
personal gain.
• Sinful rich – Cases where very wealthy people
engage in acts that may seem unethical or immoral,
including drug use, sexual deviance, and so forth.
• Evil strangers – Cases where a person unknown to
an innocent person (usually a child) does
unspeakable harm through criminal activity
motivated by personal evils.
Major Themes of
High Profile Trials
“… the rich are immoral in their use of sex, drugs,
and violence; … people in power are evil, greedy, and
should not be trusted and … strangers and those
with different lifestyles or values are inherently
dangerous.”
-- Ray Surette (2007)
Cameras in the Courts
and Pre-Trial Publicity
Race and class in the courts
• There is far more media coverage of
courtroom activity involving the poor and
people of color.
• This is logical given that the poor and people
of color and disproportionately likely to be
courtroom clients (even if it does reinforce the
myth that these people are more dangerous).
Sentencing
• For criminal justice processes to be just, they
must be fair and not be affected by
extraneous factors, such as race, gender, or
socioeconomic status.
• Instead, sentences should be based on legal
factors such as seriousness of offense and
prior criminal record.
Sentencing
• “The empirical research done by criminal
justice scholars has demonstrated with
remarkable regularity that minority group
members (particularly African Americans) and
the poor get longer sentences and have less
chance of gaining parole or probation, even
when the seriousness of the crime and the
criminal record of the defendants are held
constant.”
– Victor Kappeler and colleagues (2000)
Sentencing
• “Judges in some jurisdictions continue to impose harsher
sentences on racial minorities who murder or rape whites,
and more lenient sentences on racial minorities whose
victims are of their own racial or ethnic group. Judges in
some jurisdictions continue to impose racially biased
sentences in less serious cases; in these “borderline cases”
racial minorities get prison, whereas whites get probation.
In jurisdictions with sentencing guidelines, judges depart
from the presumptive sentence less often when the
offender is African American or Hispanic than when the
offender is white. Judges, in other words, continue to take
race into account, either explicitly or implicitly, when
determining the appropriate sentence.”
– Samuel Walker and colleagues (2006)
Sentencing
• The issue of bias in sentencing rarely comes to
the attention of the media. Why?
– Most cases disappear from the media’s focus after
the arrest stage.
– Examining racial disparities in sentencing and
discovering their sources requires resources,
something many media organizations are
unwilling to invest in such stories.
Sentencing
• One issue that has received attention of the
media is that of black killers convicted by all
white juries.
• Another issue that has received media
attention is racial bias in drug sentencing.
Sentencing
• Most Americans are unaware of these realities
due to little mainstream news coverage:
– Investigative analyses into issues such as these are
costly
– Media rely on insiders for information about crime
control policy
– Media are generally pro status quo