Friday, June 15, 2012

Seen to be done

You wouldn't know it from the MSM, but there is more to courtrooms than murders. Whether it is the morbid fascination borne of watching too many UK murder mystery dramas on TV One, or the bleeding leading headlines of our ambulance-chasing tabloid papers, all eyes are on the big murder trials. All the nuance, precedent and day-to-day miseries of the majority of dock jockeys are largely ignored, never seeing the light of day.

It's one of the reasons I support court transcripts being published online at the end of each day. Instead of the MSM being the gatekeepers of the public's access to the courts, these judicial Hansards would be available for all to read.

Stephen Stratford over at Quote Unquote links to one particular court transcript which shows the potential for such a scheme:
How to talk to a judge. This PDF of a transcript of a Queensland trial has gone viral but here it is in case you missed it. It’s only 167KB so is a tiny download and well worth it. A small sample follows (warning: this is from Australia so may contain coarse language).

And now, here's Nick Cave and Samuel L. Jackson playing the same song differently: