By Kim Powell

In 2005, the University of Canberra approached Canon to sponsor a network video system for the legal faculty’s training court, the National Court of the Future. While its primary function is to allow legal students to conduct mock trials, the facility is also used to look at how technology, such as linking witnesses to the courtroom via video, can affect juries.

Arthur Hoyle, a senior law lecturer who runs Court of the Future, says it was built in the early nineties with a cassette recorder, four microphones, a television screen and a VCR. About five years ago, the facility was upgraded and now features a central computer system as its backbone and a touch-screen controller that can control any piece of equipment in the court. By using multiple cameras at different angles, they can avoid having a ‘talking head’.

“A talking head is a serious problem, because the size of the head that you represent could be intimidating or very small and weak,” Mr Hoyle says.

“If the person has a cultural background that is causing them a problem being on video then they’re going to look very bad. And if they’re a big imposing person they may not come across that way, and that may skew a jury’s view of a person.

“We can use alternate angles and alternate views, so you can get a profile or a half side-on or a full front-on. We can split the screen so we can have four different cameras working at once and you can see the judge, the prosecutor, the witness and the jury all at the same time and we can record that as well.”

He says the students “absolutely love it” and use the court to record their performances.

“They come in and do a mock trial and we record everything and give them a DVD with their performance on it and they can go away and critique it.”

It is not just law students who benefit from the Court of the Future: the Australian Federal Police use it for teaching purposes, and forensic science students are trained in how to be professional witnesses.

“We don’t school them in how to give their answers but we teach them the type of questions they’re going to be asked and the correct way to answer them to enhance the delivery of justice, because it’s much easier for the court if they get a straight answer,” Mr Hoyle says.

The court was also used for a witness to give evidence in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague, and in the Peter Falconio murder trial.

But is there a problem using such a sophisticated teaching facility to train students who will then find themselves in a relatively low-tech professional world? Mr Hoyle says when the students go out into the legal environment they become a change agent.

“Ten years ago when I started doing this I was sending out students to law firms saying ‘why don’t you use electronic research? we do it at university’, and they weren’t doing it in the firms. Now everybody does legal research electronically,” he says.

“We’ve already starting doing online filing in the Federal Court, for instance. Two years ago nobody was doing it, so we’ve been teaching people how to do that.”

While video conferencing has been around for a while, it was not used a great deal by the courts because the cost was prohibitive.

“ISDN lines are horrendously expensive. They seem to have escaped the cost revolution that has taken place with technology because Telstra owns them and nobody else has any alternative, so they charge very high figures,” Mr Hoyle says.

“We don’t use that much now… the internet has become so powerful and so fast now that we’ve found that we can send pure video and sound down over the internet without any of this stagger vision that we used to get. That’s reduced the cost of it phenomenally and that’s made it more attractive for the courts as well.”

Canon recently donated four new digital cameras to the facility which has made a big difference to the quality of the video that can be sent over the system.

 “Now we’ve got six cameras and they’re all able to be panned and zoomed remotely, so we can control the pictures from the other end if we want to and that’s always an amazing thing to be able to do,” Mr Hoyle says.

[Wed 27/09/2006 03:20:53]

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