Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  This was a story that resonated through Sydney because it was a random attack by a stranger as Lauren walked home. Some of the evidence presented at the six-week trial about the vicious assault on Lauren was so gruesome it was suppressed by the judge and I remember being shocked at the sheer level of violence. Lauren, just eighteen at the time, was found semiconscious on the garage floor of her family’s burning home in the Sydney suburb of Northmead in 2005. She suffered severe brain damage after being bashed with fibro cutters, tied up and doused with petrol. Lauren will never fully recover from her injuries and can’t remember the attack.3

  It took a jury less than half a day to find Farmer guilty of three charges related to the attack: attempted murder, detaining Lauren for advantage and maliciously damaging the house by fire.

  This was the first guilty verdict from a jury that I heard on the court round and because the jury in this case came back so quickly, for a while I naively thought all other juries would do the same.

  Lauren’s family and friends in court shouted ‘yes’ as each guilty verdict was read out by the jury foreman.4

  In later sentencing Farmer to at least twenty years in jail, Justice Peter Hall said Farmer showed no remorse and there was no doubt he intended to kill Lauren.5 Farmer had had a criminal record since he was fifteen and it included assault and armed-robbery convictions. He had been charged with stealing thousands of litres of petrol just one month before the attack on Lauren. A footprint matching his shoe and DNA evidence were found at Lauren’s home, but he insisted that he was playing the poker machines at Northmead Bowling Club when she was attacked. He said he had signed into the club under another name that day.6

  A young radio reporter sent to the trial one day, having not covered it before, was so keen to file, she rushed outside before any of the other reporters and accidentally attributed material from a victim impact statement given by Lauren’s sister Simone, to Lauren herself. The reporter had assumed it was Lauren but later apologised to the family who were very understanding and nothing more came of it.

  It was a mistake anyone could have made and it reinforced for me an important lesson about being sure of your facts before you file a court story and checking in with other reporters who have been covering it, if you have to.

  Court reporters don’t always have the luxury of sitting through every day of a trial and a big part of the job is dipping into cases half way through or dipping in and out of them on key-witness days. So the job is made harder by having to do that and to also quickly get the gist of a case and get the story right. It’s very easy to make assumptions about who witnesses are or to not know about suppression orders unless you check.

  An easy day at work?

  Not long after I’d started the round, a well-meaning ABC colleague said to me that they envied my job because courts close at 4 p.m. and that’s a good time to finish work.

  I didn’t have enough time that day to explain that nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, most court hearings finish at 4 p.m. each day, but my typical day as a court reporter might start long before the court doors open, with a radio or television cross, before waiting outside a court building to get pictures or comments from people as they walk in.

  When the court closes at 4 p.m., there is usually more waiting around for the main players to come out before filing afternoon stories, perhaps doing a drive-time radio or a television cross and updating the online story I filed earlier in the day. All that is before the administrative work on the court list to generate stories for the next day.

  One night, covering the Peter Slipper–James Ashby sexual harassment case (which was eventually dismissed in 2012 after Peter Slipper argued the allegations were an abuse of the legal process and vexatious), I was in a media pack that waited outside the Supreme Court building in Phillip Street in the CBD until 9 p.m. for Peter Slipper to leave the building.

  Erratic hours and shift work are part of working in any media job. When I’m on a story I enjoy how time flies and I don’t really notice. With the court round, the hours balance out because some days are very long ones and on other days, everything falls over or adjourns early.

  In October 2009, on the day a jury came back with guilty verdicts for five Sydney men in one of Australia’s longest-running terrorism offence trials, I was already covering a trial involving one of the men charged over the P&O cruise ship drug overdose death of forty-two year old Brisbane woman Dianne Brimble. I was at one of the Supreme Courts at Taylor Square Darlinghurst in the CBD for the case of Mark Wilhelm, who had been charged with manslaughter and supplying a prohibited drug. The jury in his trial was ultimately not able to reach a verdict and after a retrial was ordered, the manslaughter charge was dropped in 2010 because prosecutors accepted Mark Wilhelm’s guilty plea to the drug charge. He had a conviction recorded but was not given a jail sentence because Justice Roderick Howie said he had suffered enough from years of mental illness and public humiliation since Dianne’s death in 2002.7

  Anyway, word got around the media pack at Darlinghurst that the jury was coming back in the terrorism trial, which had been held in a high-security, purpose-built court in the Sydney West Trial Courts complex at Parramatta.

  A group of five men stood trial for stockpiling weapons and planning a terrorism act in Sydney, which was going to be a violent jihad to kill high-profile public figures and target well-known landmarks. It was labelled the ‘Elomar and others’ trial and involved a year of graphic evidence, which included visions of beheadings and also planes crashing into buildings during 9/11. The trial included testimony from around 300 witnesses, 3,000 exhibits, thirty days of surveillance tapes and eighteen hours of phone taps.8

  I checked in with my newsroom and jumped in a taxi with an AAP reporter to go to Parramatta. We were almost shaking as we sifted through our notes trying to switch our focus from the cruise ship death case to the terrorism one, and I was getting my standby scripts for the terrorism verdict ready.

  Scared we would miss the Parramatta jury verdict, my AAP colleague said to the taxi driver, ‘Can you go any faster?’

  We got to Parramatta just in time for the guilty verdicts, and that day I had stories running on both of those cases across the ABC.

  Being on the court round is similar to being a foreign correspondent because you are totally absorbed in a world alien to many of your work colleagues back home in the newsroom. It becomes your norm, but it’s sometimes hard to explain it to those outside, and most aren’t aware of the day you’ve just had or the long hours or the emotion involved.

  That night I couldn’t sleep until late. A few other court reporters texted through the night to say the same thing. We were all phoning and texting to debrief and chat. The terror trial had taken up almost two years of our lives. The trial itself ran for a year, and before that, there was a year of legal argument.

  The next day we all moved on to other stories and breathed a sigh of relief it was over, but it had been so important to be able to debrief.

  Doing this round, for a long time I have become mindful of the need to cultivate resilience and a protective ‘work switch-off mechanism’. It doesn’t mean I don’t care; it just means I try to flick a switch off at the end of the day.

  The ABC also runs training for staff to learn how to deal with the vicarious trauma associated with the job. You have to be tough to do the court round, but I think the real key to surviving it long-term is not to cover too much of one particular thing and to have plenty of circuit breaks.

  I’ve been able to mix up the court stories I cover, so I’m not doing non-stop child sex abuse inquiries, for example. ICAC and civil matters, high-profile defamation cases, family feuds and Federal and High Court matters have been part of what I cover, besides violent crime and murder trials. Regular short circuit breaks to present the television news for the ABC News Channel and ABC Radio have also been part of my work mix for a long time.

  The emotional toll of court reporting and the vicarious trauma tha
t reporters, judges, juries and police can experience is very real and I have seen it change people’s personalities. They become obsessive and territorial and they lose perspective. But to be affected by a case is not out of the ordinary because sometimes it catches you off guard.

  Waiting, waiting, waiting

  Waiting is a big part of the court round and I find it more tiring than anything. There’s the waiting for cases to start, waiting for interpreters to be found, waiting for juries to be empanelled and to come back with their decisions, waiting outside for people involved in a case to come into a court building at the start of the day and again at the end of the day for them to leave, waiting for someone in the newsroom to pick up the phone to make sure they’ve got the story you’ve filed.

  ‘Pick up the phone . . . pick up,’ I say to myself, fixated on the story I’m covering and thinking at the time it is more important than anything else that is going on in the newsroom that day.

  There are times when you have to make a judgment call not to wait any longer in a court because a case is going nowhere for the day and you need to find another story.

  While there is a lot of cooperation in the media pack on the court round, I have also seen some reporters who will stop at nothing to try to be first or get an exclusive.

  Once a young journalist sent out on the road with me for a week wanted to sit in on a coroner’s inquest next door to the one I was covering. In these situations I always get people to write practice stories that are not filed, but that I can go over with them at the end of the day. So, at the end of that particular day, I asked the young reporter if he had written any sample stories for me to look through. He said ‘no’, because he had waited there all day with a reporter from another radio station who told him there was ‘nothing in it’ and ‘don’t bother filing’.

  I suspected something was up, so we sat down and went through Flashback, a system our newsroom has, so we can monitor other television and radio stations. The reporter from the radio station had filed many stories and had somehow psyched my young reporter out of writing anything. The young reporter learned a lesson that day.

  It’s not out of the ordinary for a court public gallery to be packed with reporters and the general public waiting for a trial opening and then for the opening to be delayed. The scene can be set with everyone in place — the judge, the accused, the jury and the public gallery full — but something crops up at the last minute that needs to be dealt with.

  As a court reporter, it’s hard telling this to your newsroom desk. The newsroom gives you a crew, puts your story on a prospects list and then, through no fault of your own, you can’t deliver.

  ‘Are you sure this trial will open today? Are you sure such-and-such high-profile witness will be up? Is this definitely going to go to sentence?’ the newsroom asks.

  Darting in and out of all the Supreme Courts in King Street in the CBD after one of the Robert Xie murder trials was delayed around 2014, a reporter said to me, ‘Everything’s fallen over. I can’t keep disappointing the desk like this . . . do you know if there’s anything else on today?’

  We found another story to cover for the afternoon.

  You need patience in this round. Patience and acceptance. Case fell through today. Nothing I can do about it.

  When a trial or case does open, it’s sometimes a relief, because often the opening follows months or even years of legal argument that can’t be reported on.

  Equally, heading into a court for a jury that’s about to deliver a verdict or to hear a judge hand down a sentence is nerve-wracking.

  A verdict will change someone’s life forever for better or worse.

  I never go to a sentence or jury verdict without prepared background on the case, because the demands of filing for broadcast mean sometimes getting new information a few minutes before a deadline. The tension in a courtroom at these moments can be incredible. I am in a small room with the accused person and their supporters on one side, and the victim or supporters of the victim on the other. If it’s a jury verdict I’m covering, I have three versions of the story almost ready to go — guilty, not guilty or a hung jury — using the background information from the trial. I then add in other detail including what has happened in the courtroom or outside. The verdict or judge’s decision can come a minute or two before the hour, which in radio, is enough time to go live into the bulletin and immediately email something off for online.

  One of the most dramatic moments I have seen in a courtroom was the guilty verdict for former water-polo champion Keli Lane. She was accused of murdering her newborn baby, Tegan, after leaving Auburn Hospital with her in September 1996, but the child’s body has never been found. Lane has always denied killing her baby, saying she gave the child to Tegan’s biological father with whom she had a secret affair.9

  The trial had been going on for four months. It took the jury of six men and six women a week to decide Lane was guilty. After failing to reach a unanimous verdict, the judge allowed them to reach a majority, eleven to one verdict. Keli Lane, then 35, was also convicted of three counts of lying under oath.

  When the guilty verdict was read out, Keli Lane screamed ‘no’ and fell off her seat in the dock onto the floor. Her body made a soft thump on the ground when she landed.

  She was still.

  Her mother, Sandra, then also screamed ‘no, no’ from several metres away in the public gallery and began crying uncontrollably. Trying to take in the whole room, my eyes darted from the dock across to the jury box and I noticed several jurors looked visibly upset.

  Court officers, Lane’s lawyer and family members ran over to her and gathered around her and an ambulance was called.

  I was up out of my seat and half way out the court door to file, but lingered as long as I could to make sure I didn’t miss any other detail.

  I could see Keli Lane lying there as I was ushered outside with the rest of the public gallery and the court was closed. People outside were asking each other if she had really fainted or if it was just an act? After all, here was a woman accused of hiding the most intimate details of her life from people close to her, including a pregnancy and a birth.

  On the footpath there was a frenzy of reporters on phones to their newsrooms and groups of court watchers in a huddle talking about what had happened.

  When the court was eventually reopened, Keli Lane had pulled herself together and was sitting in the dock with her lawyer. She applied for bail ahead of her sentencing, but Justice Anthony Whealy refused the bail application, saying even though he felt some sympathy for her, the conviction would mean a custodial sentence and he didn’t want to give her false hope.

  In thanking the twelve jurors, the judge said, ‘I realise this must have been a difficult case for you.’ He told them they would not have to serve on a jury again. ‘I bid you farewell for the last time.’10

  Keli Lane was later sentenced to at least thirteen years and five months jail with a maximum sentence of eighteen years.11 She lost an appeal against her conviction in the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal in late 2013 and a year later lost an application to the High Court to appeal against the conviction.12

  Her barrister, Winston Terracini SC, told a two-judge panel in the High Court, an alternative count of manslaughter should have been open to the jury because there was no evidence of how Tegan died.

  ‘There was a viable case of manslaughter,’ Mr Terracini said. ‘The jury should have been at least told . . . there was an alternative verdict. There’s no evidentiary basis on how the deceased was killed.’13

  Living the round

  The court round can be highly addictive and time consuming. One thing I noticed after starting the round was that it was both a magnet and a repellent in my social life. I started seeing less theatre — maybe court was replacing some of it. And I became less tolerant of really bad theatre.

  Also, I became more grateful for my life, which suddenly seemed so easy compared to the lives of some of the people
I was with in court.

  I’ve always considered it a privilege to be allowed to sit through court cases because I am privy to the most intimate details of people’s lives. Reporters in a court are the eyes and ears of the general public who are not there, and that comes with a responsibility to be fair and accurate.

  After being on the round for a while, I would go out or even be on public transport and strangers would come up to me and start asking about cases they had seen or heard me covering.

  ‘I don’t know how you do your job — it must be so hard sitting through all that horrible stuff,’ they would say.

  Or ‘What do you know that you can’t report?’

  Others were intrigued by the cases or had their own conspiracy theories that they were keen to share.

  On a long train trip one Sunday, I could not escape from the persistently chatty woman next to me who wanted to know what convicted gang rapists, the Skaf brothers, were really like.

  I’m sure people are constantly disappointed when I tell them most of the offenders I sit with in court are not deranged freakish Charles Manson lookalikes. They usually look like someone you could meet in a café or see walking down the street. Some are professionals. They have friends and families and have lived lives that have been, in part, quite normal and routine. That, to me, makes them all the more scary.

  On a Qantas flight back from LA one year, the cabin manager tracked me down and approached with another staff member. Thinking something was wrong, I was relieved when they just wanted to talk about the Keli Lane trial. One of them had gone to school with her.

  Most people are intrigued by crime stories but I have learned when it is time to shut up when people asked me not to talk about ‘bad things’ in front of their children.

  Once, at a friend’s birthday dinner, a professional woman said to me, ‘Aren’t you traumatised by watching the news?’ I wondered what she thought I actually did each day for a living and I tried to divert the conversation to the weather.