Communications challenges: Intimidation in our courtrooms

IT’S nearly 70 years since Aldo Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac. That beautiful book remains a cornerstone in contemporary thinking around our relationship with the natural world.

One of the book’s recurring themes is the end of solitude and man’s relentless encroachments on the quietest places. It is difficult to imagine how Leopold — born in 1887 — would reconcile ideas of solitude and today’s 24/7 communications tsunami.

Today, our justice system — or more correctly our system for the administration of justice — faces that very same question. 

The advent of mobile phone cameras has introduced a dimension into our courtrooms that needs to be recognised if the integrity of the process, and the safety of its participants, is to be as secure as they should be.

The idea that a trial can be surreptitiously broadcast over the internet as it unfolds flies in the face of the long-established choreography that supports the hope that that the law can be majestic as well as blind. 

Today’s legislation is again unequal to unimagined challenges brought by ever-evolving communications technology but it also seems an area where concerns can be easily allayed. 

A ban on the use of mobile communications in all courtrooms unless specifically authorised might be a good opening position.

There is an urgency about this as it seems only a matter of time before an important trial collapses over this intimidatory practice.