Weaver: Confiscated cameras not a good look for the court or the media

It’s not often that photojournalists’ cameras get confiscated by the government, at least not in the American land of press freedom.

But that’s exactly what happened on Oct. 18 at the opening day of the high-profile double-murder trial underway at the Carroll County Courthouse in Delphi.

Three still photographers and a videographer had their camera equipment taken away by sheriff’s deputies because the officers believed the journalists were capturing images of jurors as they arrived outside the courthouse — something expressly forbidden by Special Judge Frances Gull in her written rules of decorum.

A court order signed by the judge on Oct. 18 says authorities immediately looked at images stored on a Sony camcorder belonging to NBC’s Eric Arnold and found that they indeed included jurors. The officers then rounded up the cameras of three other photographers gathered in the same location.

Gannett’s Alex Martin was among them. He told IndyStar that he did not take photos of the jurors but that his camera equipment was confiscated anyway.

The judge’s order does not explicitly say whether all of the confiscated cameras contained images of jurors, but it does say each of the photographers violated the judge’s decorum rules and bans them from covering the proceedings. It also notes that memory cards were removed from all of the cameras so images of jurors could be deleted.

Three days later, on Oct. 21, the judge issued a notice that camera equipment had been returned to the three photographers who had retained an attorney and that the court was working to return cameras to the fourth journalist.

Not a lot else is known publicly about the situation because the photojournalists, their media outlets and their lawyer aren’t talking. And the judge has made it clear in her orders of decorum that she and her staff won’t be submitting to interviews while the trial is underway.

But there are a lot of questions about this situation that demand answers.

Certainly, if the journalists purposely set out to defy the judge’s order and sneak photos of the jurors, the punishment was appropriate.

I don’t have enough facts to know if that was the case. But it’s hard to imagine that all four journalists would want to do something so egregious that it would get them banned from covering the trial.

The more likely scenario is that there was some misunderstanding—that the journalists perhaps didn’t realize the vans pulling up to the courthouse were transporting the jurors and inadvertently took some photos, or maybe didn’t take any photos at all.

It was the first day of the trial, so journalists and sheriff’s deputies were all getting used to their roles. Did the deputies happen to warn the journalists that the jurors were arriving and that they should put their cameras down?

Martin said he was standing in an area designated as OK for media photographers, so maybe the jurors shouldn’t have been dropped off in eyesight of that area?

Maybe some of the photographers were assigned to cover the trial at the last minute and didn’t know the rules.

Regardless of the answers, the confiscation of cameras isn’t a good look for the court or the media involved.

Without a doubt, the judge has an obligation to protect the privacy of the jurors and ensure a fair trial for Richard Allen, who is accused of abducting and killing teens Abigail Williams and Liberty German while they were on a hike in February 2017.

But the media also has a right and a responsibility to report on the proceedings while making a good-faith effort to follow the court’s rules.

The balance has been accomplished at many other high-profile Indiana trials without incident.

For instance, at the trial of Orville Lynn Majors, a nurse convicted of purposely killing six patients with heart-stopping drugs in 1999, journalists and the court reached a compromise on capturing images of jurors. TV cameras were allowed to show the jurors from the waist down, often resulting in video that showed their feet shuffling toward the courtroom.

In that case, the Indiana Supreme Court’s chief justice at the time even assigned his counsel David Remondini, a former journalist, to help manage media relations.

But in the Delphi case, the confiscation of cameras has raised the eyebrows of many journalists and free-press advocates.

After the trial is over, my hope is that the news organizations, Judge Gull and the Indiana Supreme Court would be willing to explore the circumstances surrounding the confiscations and work to do better in the future.•

__________

Greg Weaver is the editor at Indiana Lawyer. Email him at [email protected].