Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  A corrupt conduct finding was made against Beth Morgan but she was not charged with any criminal offence.

  Frank Vellar was given a community service order, bond and a fine for offences related to lying to ICAC. One was fabricating a document to conceal his affair with Beth Morgan.5

  It was no surprise to me that the Wollongong Council ICAC inquiry resulted in a play, The Table of Knowledge, a collaboration between the local Merrigong Theatre and Sydney’s Version 1.0 theatre company.6 The show’s title came from a plastic table outside a kebab shop where deals were done. Witnesses at the ICAC public inquiry often referred to it in their evidence as ‘The Table of Knowledge’. The script was almost entirely written using the words of the central characters recorded in ICAC transcripts.

  I sat in on a rehearsal and drove down to Wollongong to be on the panel for a question and answer session for local theatre patrons who asked me what it was like to report on the spectacle.

  For the residents of Wollongong, the revelations from the ICAC inquiry were huge and the show played to packed houses. Some of the witnesses even had the gall to turn up on opening night and one asked an ABC crew member out the front of the theatre ‘Do you want me to walk in again so you can get a better shot?’

  That night at the opening I also got a shock phone call from the Sydney news desk to tell me the sad news that my chief of staff of ten years. Bernie Keenan, had died at sixty-six. Bernie was super fit and had suffered a heart attack jogging along the beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs where he lived.

  Just a fortnight earlier, ABC cameraman John Bean, journalist Paul Lockyer and pilot Gary Ticehurst had been killed in a helicopter crash while on assignment near Lake Eyre in South Australia. All three were big losses for the newsroom.

  Not long after the ICAC inquiry ended in 2008, one of the newsroom court reporters transferred interstate. That left a vacancy and an email went around for applications. The court round was perceived in the ABC newsroom as a hard one with content difficult to master and with long hours. I applied for it thinking it would probably go to someone who had been in the newsroom a lot longer than me.

  I got the job.

  I was shell-shocked and apprehensive. Where would I find stories? Which court would I go to each day?

  After getting over the initial fear of just how much there was to cover in this round, it unexpectedly appealed to my love of journalism but also theatre, in a way that I had never imagined it would.

  No one can really tell you everything you need to know to do the job, it’s a case of learning as you go, which I was about to find out.

  5

  Life on the road

  Finding the stories

  The first few months on the court round were tough because there were hundreds of cases in Sydney each day. Which one was the right one to cover and pitch to my newsroom?

  I had knowledge of defamation law as part of my journalism training and experience. But apart from ICAC, I had only ever been in a court once before and that was after some kids stole handbags from a dressing room at the UNSW Kensington campus when we were rehearsing a play one Saturday afternoon.

  It was around 1989 and the stage manager crash tackled one of the kids to the ground while the other kid ran off. Campus security and the police were called and they took statements. Months later I received a phone call from the police. The kids, who would have been no older than fourteen and had a long record of nicking stuff from campus, had been charged and I needed to be a witness when their case was heard at the Bidura Children’s Court in Glebe.

  I remember little more about the time in court than the prosecutor asking me to describe what happened on the day of the theft and if I could point to the person in the court who had taken one of the bags. I looked directly at the boy who was sitting just a few seats away from me and pointed. He just hung his head. I felt so guilty when I pointed him out. He was with his mother and two other smaller children. The mother was pushing a pram forward and back because a baby in it wouldn’t stop crying loudly. The woman was wearing a floral, strapless dress and thongs and looked tired and drawn.

  We got our money back, so I thought to myself, did these kids really have to get charged and put this poor mother through this?

  Years later when someone smashed my car window in broad daylight near a Glebe shopping strip and stole an empty briefcase that I had left on the passenger side floor, my thinking about Sydney’s inner city juvenile thieves had changed.

  As I was phoning the police, a resident of the house near where my car was parked came out.

  ‘Three kids did that. I saw them. They had a tyre lever,’ the resident told me.

  I drove home in sunglasses to stop glass fragments blowing into my eyes and thought I hope they catch them.

  As I started the court round I was constantly aware that even a small mistake could abort a trial or breach a suppression order so for the first few weeks I did what every new court reporter does: I followed the other court reporters around.

  The court pack seemed to share a detailed inside knowledge that I had to quickly get my head around.

  Looking knowingly at each other and with an occasional ‘Hmm’, they talked about mentions and directions hearings and suppression orders and first appearances and registries and applying for court papers. They knew where the media were allowed to sit and when was the best time to approach the bar table to ask questions of prosecutors and defence lawyers. They knew who the friendly and approachable lawyers and prosecutors were and which ones were tougher nuts to crack or who would never give a journalist the time of day. The court reporters also seemed to have strong opinions when talking to each other about the decisions juries and judges had made. They had their favourite judges and the judges who they complained about. Most importantly they had all been through the terror of being new at the job themselves and they were incredibly helpful.

  People like veteran AAP court reporter Marg Scheikowski, were always generous with their time. Media officers for the various courts such as Angus Huntsdale, Anna Cooper and Sonya Zadel were also incredibly tolerant of a newcomer to the round.

  Yes, there is competition and rivalry in the court round, but there is a sort of unofficial rule that says you help people new to it and I’ve always tried to help people the way others have helped me.

  I was so scared of missing out on something when I first started; I would sit up late at night trawling through the thousands of names listed for the next day on the various court websites and googling the names to try to see what the cases might be about.

  This constant juggling of stories is the most boring, yet essential part of the job that most court reporters dread: preparing the court list for the next day so you have stories to pitch to your newsroom. People always ask me if I dream about some of the cases I’ve covered and which ones keep me awake at night, but I think doing the court list is what gives court reporters nightmares, rather than anything else they’ve seen or heard on a court day. It’s a necessary evil to get the job done and although it does get easier with experience and accumulated knowledge, it never goes away.

  There is usually a vast array of cases listed for the Federal, Supreme, District and Local Courts, sometimes the High Court is sitting in Sydney and there are also potential coroner’s inquests, Land and Environment Court cases, tribunal hearings and other inquiries such as ICAC or royal commissions. There are long-running murder trials and high-profile cases involving politicians and celebrities that most newsrooms like to cover, along with cautionary tales about things that affect people’s hearts and pockets.

  I’ve found that with court cases — just as with choices made about other stories we put in the news — everyone has a different opinion.

  In the end someone has to make a decision and you can’t be everywhere at once. Each day on the court round there are phone calls to be made to registries, to contacts you make along the way, to judge’s associates, police prosecutors and lawyers to check on the status of cas
es, and there are arrangements to be made to pick up copies of court judgments or to download them. Although people phone you with special tip-offs to alert you to their court cases, it’s not uncommon to get to a court and find out they’ve ‘tipped off’ every other media outlet too.

  A case might be listed for the next day, but it might just be for a procedural matter rather than for an accused person to enter a plea or a judge’s decision on someone’s guilt or a sentence for a crime. The case might be on a court list for a directions hearing, where the judge and the parties in the matter discuss procedural matters before the case goes to trial at a future date. It might be listed for a mention to set a future hearing date or it might be listed for a hearing or a decision and be adjourned on the day and not end up producing a story. That’s the gamble you take and some cases can take years to actually get off the ground. After a while you get to know where they are up to, often just by physically moving in and out of a few different courts every day, and you realise that it’s a juggling act and not an exact science.

  For months, if I was the only reporter in a court, I was nervous I missing out on some big story and would wonder where the rest of the pack was. That feeling wore off after a while and I started to find my own way around and learned to source stories and navigate my way through the Lawlink website. It was like a rite of passage when I eventually had the confidence to do my own thing a bit, but this fear of missing things as a court reporter is omnipresent. It’s fear of missing not only a ‘better’ story than the one you’re on, but also of not being able to hear what’s being said properly as you try to hang off every word for accuracy and fair and balanced reporting and the fear of breaching a suppression order. The acoustics of some courts are better than others and in an effort to hear what’s being said, you are trying to block out the page rustling and whispering and often the sounds of a constant stream of people moving in and out of the public gallery around you.

  Despite what we see on television crime shows, not everything that happens in a real-life court is high drama and an obvious story. A lot of what is said is truly boring and you sometimes have to sit for hours and wait and wait and wait for a matter to come up or a development in a trial that’s underway. A moment of inattention can mean you’ve missed the story. The focus and accuracy needed for court reporting can be intense. Missing a filing deadline is not an option.

  ABC NewsRadio manager Helen Thomas says that when she was a young court reporter for The Age, the discipline involved in listening carefully and getting everything right, including the most basic things like the spelling of names and balancing both sides of the story, grounded her for the rest of her work as a journalist.1

  In a court, after a while, you develop an ear for key words and ‘court talk’ that might make a story. Words like ‘charges dropped’, ‘extra charges’, a ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ plea, ‘bail conditions’ or ‘variations’ or how a prisoner is holding up in jail.

  Often too there’s no story in what’s been actually said in court, but getting case papers from the registry or getting a hold of documents tendered, can produce gold.

  A judge will sometimes come onto the bench, rule in favour of one of the parties and say, ‘I publish my reasons’ and walk off. There’s then a frenzy during which reporters try to get a paper copy of the judgment in the courtroom from the court staff and those who miss out try to look over the shoulders of others when the pack moves outside.

  Sometimes there’s a huddle of reporters outside a court cross-checking quotes they’ve taken down inside or trying to decipher a complicated 200-page judgment in just a few minutes before they file on it.

  I have been at sentence hearings and bail applications that have run for hours and seemed to be heading in a particular direction but then take a surprise twist at the end.

  At times it is hard for someone who isn’t a lawyer to understand what has actually just happened in a judgment and it’s a matter of asking the prosecutors and lawyers outside to explain it in layman’s terms.

  When you first start writing court stories you also think you have to include all sorts of wordy detail to ‘get them right’. But they are like any other news story for broadcast or print. You need the facts of ‘Who, What, When, How and Why’ and to be able to nail a radio broadcast story in thirty seconds (that is three or four short sentences), a television package in around ninety seconds and an online story in about 500 words. Any extra information and colour is fodder for live television and radio crosses and a longer online piece.

  Crafting a complicated court story into a tight thirty-second voice report or talking to a camera without umming and ahhing and looking down at notes, is a skill that you can only hone by doing it. No one can teach you in theory.

  The court round is one that involves all reporters vying for the same material and mostly using the same talent, that is, filming and talking to the same people outside courts, so there is a lot of sharing of vision and audio material between networks.

  Court stories are not usually picture-rich so any shots of people going in and out or talking outside the court are sought after.

  On the job, court reporters tend to watch out for each other because there is safety in numbers if we sit together when there is an angry mob glaring from the next seats in the public gallery. Standing in the foyer of Central Local Court in Liverpool Street one afternoon, the girlfriend of one of the men charged over the Sydney Airport bikie brawl spat on me and started a tirade of abuse. Other reporters stood close and called a court sheriff over.

  I have been bailed up by solicitors many times covering some of the court cases that have resulted from ICAC inquiries.

  One solicitor stood in the doorway to a court at the Downing Centre and said to me, ‘You’re not allowed in here.’

  ‘It’s open court,’ I replied and darted under his arm that was stretched across the doorway.

  The same solicitor was waiting for me on the court steps that afternoon. I left with two other reporters so he kept a distance.

  Days later, former Channel Ten court reporter Gabrielle Boyle was in the same court for the sentencing of a taxi driver who assaulted a female passenger. The judge appropriately said the man had a blatant disregard for women. Outside the court, the man elbowed Gabby and she fell across the bonnet of a taxi onto the road. Luckily the taxi was stationary and other reporters helped her up and out of the traffic and she kept working.2

  Despite the camaraderie, the court round is also like any other newsroom round in that allegiances are formed, enemies are made and there are territorial reporters threatened by competition.

  On the steps of the Downing Centre one Friday afternoon, I saw a newspaper reporter yelling at a television reporter whose microphone flag masked the face of the person everyone was trying to get a shot of.

  ‘Get it out of the way! You wouldn’t even have this story without me. It’s my story.’

  I have also seen a reporter blatantly lie when a rival turned up outside the Supreme Court.

  ‘What are you here for?’ the rival asked.

  ‘The sentencing hearing in King Street five,’ the reporter said before heading into something else.

  It didn’t me take long to work out that if I had an exclusive court story, it would sometimes only be mine for an hour.

  All the Sydney newsrooms monitor each other, so as soon as my story ran in a radio news bulletin, other reporters would turn up out of the woodwork. That’s the way it works in a twenty-four-hour news cycle; always greedy for content.

  My first week in the job, I was lining up at the Downing Centre — or ‘Drowning Centre’ as I have heard some lawyers call it — waiting to get through security. The line wound all the way back to the main entrance on the ground floor.

  ‘Can you take our bags and mind a place in the line while we go and get coffees?’ asked two seasoned court reporters who were with me.

  Getting into the Downing Centre court building can be a long, slow process some
mornings. It’s the busiest court in Sydney and you are in line with lawyers, people waiting to get picked for jury duty, people making court appearances, the media and people who wander in off the street to stay out of the heat or cold. Getting through can seem to take forever when you’re in a hurry. Think of airport security with everyone emptying out their bags and pockets and putting their stuff on a conveyor belt to be X-rayed. Think of the frustration you feel when people at the airport are slow, unprepared and still try to sneak through with change in their pockets and umbrellas and strange objects in their bags and who then get sent back out and told to come through again. Think of the silly arguments people have with the security staff who are only doing their job.

  That’s exactly what it can be like to get through security at the Downing Centre and that’s even before the race for the crowded lifts to get to some of the upstairs courts.

  So, on my first day at the Downing Centre I took the two reporters’ bags through security and saved a place for them in line thinking there was a coffee in it for me.

  They came back with coffee for themselves — but not for me.

  The next day when they asked me to carry the bags again, I agreed and asked one reporter to get me a coffee.

  ‘I couldn’t carry it,’ was the excuse when they again came back without one for me.

  By day three the bag carrying had extended to, ‘Can you take notes for us? We’ll be in in a minute.’

  And on that day they just dumped the bags down and walked off talking, assuming I would pick them up and carry them through security for them.

  I decided not to pick the bags up and I walked into court on my own that day.

  ‘Where are our bags?’ one asked when they came into court thirty minutes late.

  ‘Hopefully for you, wherever you left them,’ I whispered.

  Luckily the bags were still in the foyer and they never asked me to carry them again.

  Just after starting the round, I covered some of the 2008 attempted murder trial of Robert Black Farmer, the thirty-nine year old carpenter who brutally bashed twenty-eight year old Sydney TAFE student Lauren Huxley.