Law in Contemporary Society

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What Frank Saw

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<		Frank might be persuaded to qualify his position that fact-finding is an inescapably subjective process if he were given the opportunity to pierce the veil of time and live in our world of ubiquitous video recording. A man of tremendous foresight who trusted the power of scientific instrumentation, he opined in Law and the Modern Mind in 1930:
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>		Jerome Frank might be persuaded to qualify his position that fact-finding is an inescapably subjective process if he were given the opportunity to pierce the veil of time and live in our world of ubiquitous video recording. A man of tremendous foresight who trusted the power of scientific instrumentation, he opined in Law and the Modern Mind in 1930:
 
"It is no easy task for the judge to bring together in his mind for the purpose of finally reaching his conclusions as to facts, what is frequently a voluminous body of testimony… It may well be that the courts will some day adopt a recent mechanical innovation and that we shall have ‘talking movies’ of trials, which will make possible an almost complete reproduction of the trial so that the judge can consider it as his leisure."
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<		Twenty years before penning Courts on Trial, Frank predicted that video records of proceedings would ease the process of judicial fact-finding. I posit that the spread of mobile video recording has already and will continue to lessen the subjective nature of fact-finding. I do not assert that we stand on the verge of completely eliminating all subjectivity, but I assert that the impetus to use legal magic may be partially overcome by a meaningful step towards objective fact-finding.
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>		Twenty years before penning Courts on Trial, Frank predicted that video records of proceedings would ease the process of judicial fact-finding. I posit that the spread of mobile video recording has already and will continue to lessen the subjective nature of fact-finding. I do not assert that we stand on the verge of completely eliminating all subjectivity, but I assert that the impetus to hide subjectivity with legal magic may be partially overcome by a meaningful step towards objective fact-finding.
 

What I saw

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<		On the morning of February 10, I watched an argument at the Second Circuit in the case of United States v. Siddiqui. The AUSA relied upon conflicting eyewitness testimony in charging Siddiqui with having shot several military officers. The eyewitnesses could not agree as to the number of shots fired or the types of guns used in the shooting. Defense counsel’s forensic expert even suggested that no shots had been fired at all based upon the lack of evidence that projectiles had impacted any surface in the room. That appellate judges had to weigh the credibility of witnesses they had not even directly observed put Frank’s 1930 and 1949 theses into sharp relief for me.
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>		On the morning of February 10, 2012, I watched an argument at the Second Circuit in the case of United States v. Siddiqui. The AUSA relied upon conflicting eyewitness testimony in charging Siddiqui with having shot several military officers. The eyewitnesses could not agree as to the number of shots fired or the types of guns used in the shooting. Defense counsel’s forensic expert even suggested that no shots had been fired at all based upon the lack of evidence that projectiles had impacted any surface in the room. The fact that appellate judges had to weigh the credibility of witnesses they had not even directly observed put Frank’s 1930 and 1949 theses into sharp relief for me.
 

What Other Courts Saw


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Revision 2r2 - 15 Feb 2012 - 05:27:30 - KieranCoe
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