Federal Courts Going Digital?
U.S.terror trial will feature evidence posted online as soon as it's introduced.
July 10, 2007 — -- A federal judge in New Jersey is planning a potentially precedent-setting move in the "Fort Dix Six" terror trial: He is ordering that all the evidence introduced during the trial be posted on the Internet as soon as it's presented in court.
With no cameras or recording devices allowed inside federal courtroom, the move by U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler is being seen as a boon to public access and a potentially timesaving solution for overburdened federal dockets nationwide.
"This process is transparency at its zenith," Richard Lavinthal, head of PRforLaw, LLC, and a former spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey.
"No longer will Joe Q. Citizen have to wait for Mary the reporter to file her story with Joe the city editor, that gets approved by Bill the managing editor and eventually gets out to the public," Lavinthal told ABC News. "This could erase the line between [newsmakers] and the public."
The case in question is the trial of six men accused of planning to attack New Jersey's Fort Dix. Federal prosecutors have described the group of men as domestic Islamic extremists inspired by al Qaeda and other jihadist terror propaganda videos on the Internet. It's expected to garner national media attention and strong public interest.
Five of the six defendants were charged with planning an ambush paramilitary-style attack on the complex, while a sixth man was charged with helping to supply the group with guns.
Kugler has said he watched with interest as federal prosecutors in the federal trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot, made evidence available to reporters the morning after it was introduced into evidence.
He said he wanted to take advantage of all the technology available to the court system, which will include allowing reporters covering the Fort Dix case to use the court's wireless Internet access to report in real time. An overflow room with a video feed of the proceeding and wireless access will make it possible to allow more of the press to cover the case.
The Internet is slowly becoming a valuable tool of the courts. The online evidence plan follows the widely watched federal trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, in which online bloggers were given media credentials for the first time.
Kugler has said he is not trying to be a trailblazer.
"I just wondered why it couldn't be done," Kugler said recently, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "We're here to serve the public, and this is a better way to serve the public."
Kugler declined to comment Monday to ABC News, but he is expected to discuss more details of the plan in a status hearing Friday in federal court in New Jersey.
For Lavinthal, who launched some of the first federal court Web sites in the mid '90s, Kugler's move is a big step in the right direction.
"In 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing, one night when I got the third call from a CNN reporter in the middle of the night and my wife rolled over and said, 'I'm going to kill that guy,' I decided we needed a better system to distribute updates and information on the case," he said.
He put up a Web site and alerted hundreds of reporters at once of case updates on the site with a mass e-mail.
"We reduced media calls by 60 [percent] to 70 percent immediately," Lavinthal said. "They were happy to get the information, and it freed me up to do other work."
Lavinthal sees similar benefits in the Kugler experiment. "This is a win for everyone," he said.