Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  AT THE START OF a long-running trial, a court public gallery can be like the plane cabin on a long-haul flight. At a trial opening, just like the start of any overseas flight, the public gallery is neat, clean and well ordered, but by the end of some days, it can be a mess. There’s sometimes rubbish on the floor, grubby bathrooms and air heavy with germs and all sorts of emotions. There’s a code of conduct for court public galleries, but sitting in them each day, I sometimes feel as though I’m at a football match or a concert. Little things sometimes go undetected by the uniformed court officers who provide courtroom support and the court sheriffs who look after security and keep things under control.

  One of the strangest days I’ve spent in a public gallery was in the upstairs section of King Street Court 3 in February 2015 during the start of the third Robert Xie murder trial.

  The day seemed to be going slowly with a witness giving evidence through a translator. The lower part of the public gallery was full so I sat upstairs where there was also a jostle for seats. About an hour into the afternoon session of evidence, a couple sitting in front of me began sharing a parcel of hot chips in very noisy wrapping paper. They were both wearing tracksuit pants and T-shirts and the woman had huge, gold hoop earrings.

  I thought at first they might be holidaying backpackers who had come into the court for a while for something to do. So I leaned forward and politely pointed out that eating was not allowed but they both stared me down defiantly and kept gorging themselves. There were clear signs everywhere. No eating or drinking is allowed in court but people try to get away with it all the time. Once, going through security at the Downing Centre, a man even had a six pack of beer confiscated from his backpack.

  So at the Robert Xie trial I attracted the attention of a friendly court sheriff who gave the couple the option to go outside and eat their hot chips or to hand them over. They refused and after lots of conversation in very loud whispers the officer went downstairs to get back up. When he returned with two colleagues, the couple must have felt outnumbered because they handed the chips over.

  The witnesses continued to be questioned in the witness box below us and I continued to take notes, thinking ahead about an angle for my radio story for the next hour and whether the day’s evidence would be strong enough for a live ABC News Channel cross. The translator for the witness spoke very softly and the reporters around me were all leaning as far forward as they could to try to hear.

  Suddenly the chip woman, whom Daily Telegraph court reporter Amy Dale noted looked a little like a female version of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whispered in chip man’s ear.

  She then put her hand under his shirt and started rubbing his back.

  Trying to concentrate on the evidence, at first I pretended not to notice but then chip woman pulled chip man’s shirt right up to his neck and continued the massage.

  ‘Ooh yuk . . . Too much back fat and way too much hair,’ quipped a male reporter sitting next to me.

  ‘Tell them to stop,’ he said.

  ‘You tell them,’ I replied. ‘They wouldn’t listen to me about the hot chips.’

  A few people started to clear their throats and cough loudly hoping the chip couple would get the hint and tone it down but it only seemed to encourage them.

  By now the entire row of reporters and court watchers sitting behind the couple had completely lost interest in what the prosecutor and a witness were saying and they were fixated on the back massage too.

  When someone else leaned forward and politely asked the couple to stop, the woman responded with, ‘Get fucked.’

  She was definitely not an overseas backpacker. That was a rough as guts Aussie accent.

  Fearing a brawl would ensue, I again went in search of a court sheriff. I explained what was happening; this time he stared at me in disbelief.

  ‘What do you want me to do about that?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell them to stop — it’s gross,’ I replied.

  The couple were eventually asked to leave and at the end of the day I discovered them sitting outside the court building on the veranda contentedly smoking cigarettes.

  Did they have any involvement in the case? What was their interest in it? The mystery couple refused to answer any of my questions about who they were and how they were connected to the case.

  ‘How do you think it went in there today?’ I asked the woman.

  She silently blew cigarette smoke in my face.

  I tried the man, ‘Were you neighbours of the Xie family?’

  He rolled his eyes at me before they both got up, walked off and boarded a bus in Elizabeth Street.

  A few days later, during the same trial, a brawl in the King Street Courthouse foyer was so disruptive the judge had to send the jury out until it could be broken up. Sitting towards the back of the gallery taking notes, we first became aware of raised voices in the foyer outside.

  The voices got louder and louder before an unidentified female screamed, ‘Leave me alone,’ followed by a string of expletives then, ‘Leave me alone,’ and some high-pitched screaming.

  I bowed to the judge, Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, then moved into the foyer to see what all the commotion was about. In the foyer it took four court officers to remove the woman who was kicking and hitting them and swearing very loudly.

  When I went back into court some of the jurors in the Xie trial looked petrified. Justice Fullerton apologised to them and sent them out for a break until the drama in the foyer was over.

  When calm was restored the jury came back.

  ‘Take two,’ said the judge. She explained that someone’s spouse or partner lost their temper because bail had not been granted in the court next door and that the noisy person had been removed from the building and the whole drama had nothing to do with the Robert Xie murder trial. Justice Fullerton also explained that the court officers who had gone to help were very important people because they would be bringing the jurors their lunch each day.

  I wondered that day if jurors, like people on long flights, ever get so bored that they hang out for meal times no matter how bad the food is.

  13

  Court officers and court sheriffs

  COURT OFFICERS AND SHERIFFS must have the patience of saints to put up with what they encounter in public galleries. Some do it with a smile. Others seem not so amused by it all.

  The sheriffs look after court security and often seat people in the public gallery with an eye to keeping them apart.

  The court officers make sure the court is ready before the doors are open, take the jurors in and out as directed by the judge, call the witnesses into the court and swear them in with an oath or affirmation. Some of the sheriffs are former police officers or security staff and most are very good at dealing with the general public.

  Some sheriffs get to know the reporters.

  ‘Who is everyone here for today?’ the sheriffs will sometimes ask as we make our way through security in the morning.

  Yet I have seen some, a little overzealous on the job, especially when it comes to letting reporters use their mobile phones in court. At one local court, an overly keen officer was friendly enough but was convinced that reporters were not allowed to have their mobile phones with them. The officer, who was nicknamed ‘Turps’ because of his vague resemblance to the late The Price Is Right television host Ian Turpie, targeted Channel Seven’s Lee Jelosek every time. It got to be a game of cat and mouse between them. Lee would walk into court and Turps would eye him off from the other side of the room, just waiting for the reporter to get his phone out. Lee would start to text on the phone then Turps would bound across the room to try to confiscate it.

  In New South Wales, with the exception of certain high-security cases or cases where the judge makes particular orders otherwise, reporters are allowed to have their phones in court to text and email, but not to talk on them and the phones must be on silent. Court officials may also ask for them to be turned off if the phones interfere with the equipment the cou
rt uses to record the proceedings, which occasionally happens in the main Supreme Court complex in Phillip Street.

  In some high-security trials, such as those related to terrorism matters, phones are not allowed in court at all, which for reporters, slows down the filing process.

  So after months of being hassled by Turps, Lee got an email from the court media office that outlined what he was and what he wasn’t allowed to do with his phone in court. Lee stuck a print out of the email on a piece of cardboard and would just hold it up near his face every time Turps walked towards him.

  ‘Turps and Jelosek are at it again,’ someone said one day as the pair argued over whether or not Lee could keep his phone with him.

  Eventually I think Turps just gave up.1

  But his enthusiasm for his job also made court life interesting for former Channel Nine court reporter Jessica Rich. He would confiscate her hairspray each morning as she put her bags on the conveyor belt to go through security. Jess would repeatedly reassure him she was not going to be irresponsible with the hairspray and that she needed it to do her job.

  Jess would also show him her media ID but Turps would not budge.

  Over time he built up quite a collection of her hairspray cans and would often hand large armfuls of them back to her at once.2

  At the Darlinghurst Courthouse in Taylor Square, on 11 February 2014, Simon Gittany was sentenced for murdering his Canadian fiancé Lisa Harnum by pushing her off a fifteenth floor balcony. The court sheriffs were very calm and composed as they removed two of his relatives from the public gallery at the judge’s request.

  I was just a few seats away from Gittany’s family when he was sentenced to a maximum of twenty-six years in jail with a non-parole period of eighteen years. Gittany sat quietly with his hands together and blinked a few times but otherwise showed no emotion.

  One of his sisters, however, exploded with rage, screaming, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, you won’t be doing any of that time.’

  Justice Lucy McCallum ordered the woman out of the court and other relatives followed.

  Gittany had faced trial before a judge without a jury; and in finding him guilty, Justice McCallum said he had flown into a rage because he knew Lisa Harnum was going to leave him and go home to her family in Canada. The judge said Gittany had no true respect for the autonomy of the woman he claimed to love. Justice McCallum said Lisa Harnum must have felt complete terror just before she died and described Gittany as ‘arrogant’ and as someone who thought he owned his girlfriend. The judge talked about his controlling behaviour and said he had punished Lisa Harnum during their relationship for ‘small acts of defiance’ such as wearing her hair down.

  The court heard not only about his violence towards Lisa Harnum but also a previous incident in which he bit off part of a policeman’s ear in 1994.

  ‘It has a troubling resonance with the present offence,’ Justice McCallum said. ‘Each appears to have entailed a sudden loss of control and a response of extreme violence to a blameless act.’3

  Gittany had always maintained he was innocent.

  Just a few days earlier at his sentencing hearing on 6 February 2014 he had described himself as a ‘God-fearing Christian’ who would ‘never kill anyone’.4 I was surprised at that sentencing hearing to see Gittany take the highly unusual step of giving evidence himself. He had told the court that because of the publicity surrounding the case, his entire life had been displayed in front of Australia and also the world. Gittany said he did not murder Lisa Harnum and that he was charged with a crime that was ‘a cross almost unbearable to bear’.

  People in the gallery started whispering to each other that day when Simon Gittany’s new girlfriend Rachelle Louise cried in the witness box and described him as a romantic and caring man. She told the court she had put her own money towards his trial costs but also acknowledged, under further questioning, that she had been paid to take part in a television interview about the case.

  Outside the court Rachelle Louise and other Gittany supporters and family members carried handwritten protest signs stating that he was innocent. It was a rather eerie silent protest and they refused to say much to reporters.

  One sign read, ‘How did Lisa hit the 14th awning especially if she was unconscious.’

  On another sign said, ‘Why was Lisa still holding her handbag and how if she was unconscious?’

  Another sign listed the names of people who previously had murder convictions overturned on appeal, including Gordon Wood, Lindy Chamberlain, Roseanne Catt and Andrew Mallard.5

  The Sydney Morning Heralds’s Kate McClymont praises the calm of the court sheriffs who helped her one day during the long-running defamation case lodged by the late Sydney solicitor John Marsden against the Seven Network after its Today Tonight program alleged he had sex with underage boys. The case was before various courts between 1995 and 2003 when he accepted a financial settlement from the network.

  One day during the trial, a man sitting next to Kate in the public gallery told her he was meant to give evidence but was no longer needed, so he had taken an overdose of pills and had the right to die quietly in the gallery in front of Marsden. Kate quietly took him outside, called an ambulance and alerted the court sheriffs. The man refused to get in the ambulance but eventually a police car dropped him off at a nearby hospital where his stomach was pumped.

  Another day in a public gallery, Kate just missed getting showered with the pea and ham soup that a man threw at his brother during a case to settle the estate of a well-known Sydney brothel madam.6

  14

  Juries

  I SEE THE STRAIN on the faces of jurors some days and I do not envy them because it must be an incredibly difficult job. So much responsibility. Someone’s future is in their hands.

  When the jury foreman stands to deliver a verdict after a long trial, it’s not unusual for some jurors to fight back tears. Being on a jury must be socially challenging too, with complete strangers chosen at random from the community, suddenly thrown together and tasked with working as a team. They can’t move away and go sit somewhere else if they don’t get on. Some cases take up months of juror’s lives and the experience must be life changing. They are sometimes forced to sit through volumes of dry, technical evidence that they may have previously had no understanding of or any interest in.

  I have sat and watched juries getting empanelled, wondering where the potential jurors have travelled from and where they work. Both the defence and the prosecutor each get three strike-outs without reason, to remove some people they don’t want on a jury. I look at jurors sometimes and wonder what their in-built prejudices are, because we all have some of these that might not even be logical. Our experiences in life go through a personal filter and we make decisions in a few seconds about people based on how they look and what their background is.

  There is research that suggests juries even make assumptions about an accused person based on whether the person is sitting in an open dock, at the bar table with their legal team or in an enclosed glass dock. The suggestion is, that jurors think an accused person is more dangerous and guilty if they are in a closed or glassed-off area.1

  Reporters are usually sent outside when juries are empanelled but occasionally we are allowed to sit in. It can be a long and slow process selecting people from a pool of potential jurors. A judge’s job is to make sure the accused gets a fair trial and they usually give jurors a warning about their responsibilities, an overview of the case they’ll be sitting through and a witness list to make sure they don’t know anyone who will be giving evidence.

  I have seen prospective jurors hand judges notes or present various reasons for why they can’t be on a jury.

  One woman didn’t want to be on a Supreme Court jury for a gay-hate murder trial because she said she knew about the case, ‘didn’t like gay people’ and had already made up her mind about the offender’s guilt. She was excused, but the judge gave her a stern warning about her civic duty as a juror.
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  Another told the judge he couldn’t handle seeing photos that depicted serious injuries or violence.

  When a jury is empanelled, judges always tell jurors not to make their own investigations into a case and to ignore media reports about it. I think it must sometimes be impossible not to have seen or read about many high-profile cases somewhere. They are also told not to talk to anyone at home about what they hear in court, but I think that must at times be very hard.

  At the start of a drug trial at the Downing Centre one day, I looked across to see most of the jurors studiously taking notes. One man, however, fidgeted constantly and peered at me over the top of his glasses before looking around at everyone else in the public gallery. I could see him drawing pictures in his notebook. Was he concentrating on the case before him or thinking about what else was going on in his life and the world outside the damp-smelling, artificially lit courtroom we were in?

  I have seen jurors fall asleep, pick their noses and clean wax out of their ears in court. Jurors whose body language suggests they are at odds with the rest of the jury — sitting with arms folded and turned away from them. Jurors who look too young to have the life experience that might be needed to make a decision that could send someone to jail for a long time or acquit them of something serious.

  Waiting in the foyer of the Downing Centre for cases to start, some days I see the long lines of people called up for jury duty file past. They come from all walks of life and they have conversations about their work, their families and some try to bedazzle others with what they think is their superior knowledge of the law. They look eager, excited, nervous, scared, bored or annoyed.

  In 2008, a jury was discharged for playing Sudoko in the books the jurors had been given to take notes in during a long-running District Court drug trial in Sydney. The judge’s attention was drawn to the behaviour after two men standing trial noticed that the jurors were writing vertically and not horizontally as they would be doing if they were actually taking notes about what was being said in court. This was after around 100 witnesses had given evidence and the cost of the trial, which was almost at the end, had reached at least $1 million. A solicitor who was representing one of the accused men told ABC Local Radio, the jury looked to be writing a lot of information down so everyone had just assumed they were being diligent.2