Technology Services

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John Southerst

In five crowded but otherwise unremarkable courtrooms of the 13th Judicial Circuit Court of Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, everyday events are the envy of court administrators elsewhere.

• A juvenile offender is brought before a judge on a repeat drug offense. "What did I say to him last time?" the judge asks the court reporter. The reporter taps a few keys on her laptop. Within seconds, the court's sound system comes to life with the judge's recorded voice: "If you come back before me testing positive on a urinalysis, you'll go to jail." Instantly, he knows the youth has already ignored a stark warning.

• In mid-trial, attorneys dispute an interpretation of earlier testimony. The judge asks for the official record. Until recently, the request could bring a long delay while the reporter rewound audio tape and searched for the appropriate testimony. But the reporter simply calls up a playback screen on a laptop, activates the witness's audio channels, scrolls up the automated annotations to the voice log, and selects from the pick list. Seconds later, the witness's voice repeats the testimony.

• A defense lawyer needs to file an urgent appeal. Under normal conditions, overburdened reporters may take weeks to search for a stored audio tape, then transcribe the deteriorated recording. In Tampa, the lawyer simply asks for the digital audio file, along with its annotations, to be electronically transmitted to a bulletin board system. Later that day, he downloads the file via modem and listens to the crucial passages.

What lets these Tampa courtrooms operate with such speed, accuracy, and convenience? Since 1996, the 13th Judicial Circuit Court has been transforming the way court proceedings are recorded, stored, and transcribed using COURTROOM-DART, a digital recording and transcription management system.  With the ability to tie a digital audio record to digital video and documentation such as court orders, probation reports, or test results, Tampa's system will ultimately put more information at a judge's fingertips while reducing the cost of record storage and distribution.

"This is truly a multimedia approach to filing and retrieving information in a network environment," says Abdiel Ortiz, director of court communications and technology services for the 13th Judicial Circuit. "It has changed the way we do business. We spend much less time searching for tapes and it has expedited action in many cases. Soon, we'll be able to retrieve all case information on demand and associate each element with the appropriate documentation, including faces and names."

While this may appear to be a futuristic vision of multimedia justice, it's fast becoming reality in Hillsborough County. The Tampa court has already tied together six buildings with fiber optic cable in a combination LAN/WAN (local area/wide area network). This wired court complex includes the civil, family, criminal, and juvenile courts, as well as the public defender and district attorney's office. The network is not only the conduit through which the courts' administrative office provides normal office automation such as word processing and accounting software, but also the conduit for a growing volume of other digital information, especially video and audio services.

One digital innovation, the Court Video Network, creates a kind of "virtual court." Judges in the five specially linked digital courtrooms can hear remote testimony, for instance, from the Children's Advocacy Center, a facility for juveniles suspected of being sexually abused. The video network also transmits depositions, arraignments, legal motions, bond reduction hearings, and first appearances for all kinds of offenses from three jails and the juvenile detention center. In fact, 150 to 180 people appear each day for their day in video court.

While video records will ultimately be a valuable resource, the official court record is still the audio. An uncomplicated, accurate system that's easy to search, simple to transcribe, and inexpensive to store carries far-reaching implications for a fair and swift justice system. Those implications are magnified by digital technology's ability to cross-reference other documents in a relational database.

Microphones at the podiums, the judge's chair, attorneys' tables, and in the ceiling record high-quality digital sound straight to a computer hard drive on separate tracks. Court reporters register who is speaking with a keystroke, creating an annotated log that's stored with the audio record. When a judge asks for a statement to be replayed for a court, a few keystokes accomplish the task in seconds. If a case is resumed after a delay, even weeks later, the record of past proceedings is accessible with a few clicks of a mouse. With long searches for multiple tapes eliminated, requests for a transcript are fulfilled in a fraction of the time it once took.

Ease of use and greater accessibility to court records are certainly compelling features. But storage advantages in particular are winning accolades from court administrators. One 4-gigabyte (GB) digital audio tape smaller than a standard audio cassette now records 277 hours of testimony with the bandwidths the Tampa court's software uses to record human voice. But soon-tobe-released 40-GB digital formats will carry an amazing 2,770 hours--with better quality reproduction than standard analog recordings and virtually no deterioration over time. Storage on compact discs achieves even greater space savings.

"The difference for us," says Ortiz, "is that we now store our audio records on a server with a footprint of five inches by 18 inches, instead of in a room 10 feet by 10 feet and stacked with tapes top to bottom."

Record and transcription management experts at BCB Technology Group Inc., a subsidiary of BCB Holdings, the developer of the Tampa system, say the exponential growth in storage memory will eventually lead to complete digital access to case files in one convenient location. "With these storage capacities," says Leo Halpern, senior vice-president of operations at BCB, "the next step is to have police and case management documents reproduced digitally so that when a case is called, the clerk will call up a full file with the docket on screen for the judge to read."

For the Tampa court, the benefits of digital recording have only begun to kick in. "There's no exact number we can place on our savings so far," says Ortiz, "because so much of our motivation is cost avoidance, not just cost reduction. But the impact we see is tremendous in terms of productivity and convenience." And as digitization reaches into more of Hillsborough County's courtrooms--nine by the end of the year--Ortiz hopes it may eventually reduce the massive paperload of running a court system. "It may not necessarily happen," he says with a smile, "but we will definitely have more information to share with judges and lawyers."

That can only be good for justice.

John Southerst, a former senior editor of Canadian Business magazine, is a Toronto-based business writer.  He can be reached at (905) 304-5434 or by e-mail at jsouth@istar.ca