Courts: The Empty Room

In the days when defense lawyers spouted Scripture and wept real tears, Americans had the time of their lives at public trials. “People came for miles to hear those closing arguments,” recalls a nostalgic Georgia judge. “It was almost like a Shakespearean festival.” Today, sensational murder trials still draw S.R.O. audiences. But at a time when everyone frets over rising crime, hardly anyone attends the normal felony trial, to say nothing of misdemeanors. From where he sits in Texas, a state that once loved litigation even more than football, San Antonio’s Criminal Court Judge Archie Brown flatly says: “The empty courtroom is a national problem that indicates indifference to human rights.”

Who Cares? “A public trial is a basic freedom,” argues Brown. Indeed, early Americans so resented English secret trials that the Sixth Amendment guarantees to all criminal defendants “the right to a speedy and public trial.” But now, says Brown, “people have gradually lost the fear that created the amendment. They have begun to take things for granted. Especially in big cities, we are getting self-centered. We mentally live in a segment of the city. If our neighbor’s house is burglarized, we might take an interest. But if the same crime occurs across town, that’s the other side of the world.”

Of the 1,200 criminal trials a year in Bexar County (San Antonio), only half a dozen attract enough spectators to make judges even aware of their presence. Another 15 or so attract from two to eight people. As Judge Brown sees it, empty courtrooms adversely affect jurors. Concluding that no one cares, “a juror may be tempted to lay on a heavy sentence.” Conversely, “he may decide that no one thinks the crime is serious and then assess a light sentence.” Judge Brown is troubled: “When a man’s liberty or life is at stake in my court, I like to think someone is interested.”

“Theirs.” Many another Texan apparently shares Brown’s concern. “People no longer identify with the law,” says Sociologist O. Z. White of San Antonio’s Trinity University. “The old-timer felt that every trial was his-he was the people. Now it is ‘their’ trial, not ‘ours.’ ” Atlanta’s Superior Court Judge Luther Alverson even suggests that declining trial attendance may contribute to rising crime. “I do not think it is good for people to be removed from the realities of what goes on from day to day in our cities. It is important for people to learn who commits crime, and more about their motivations.” After all, warns Alverson, “our entire system of law and order is wrapped up in what goes on in our courtrooms.”