Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  Studious jurors have also written notes of complaint to judges after noticing reporters texting on their mobile phones or writing on their iPads in the public gallery. It must be seriously hard for jurors to be without their electronic devices while they are on jury duty and to see us sitting in the gallery each day using ours.

  There have also been cases of jurors discharged for ‘flirting’ with the accused, and, in the case of the Gordon Wood murder trial, a jury was discharged for planning their own investigations outside the court.

  It’s easy to forget during a long trial, that jurors, like anyone else get sick and have family emergencies. Sometimes I have turned up for a case that doesn’t end up sitting that day because of a juror down.

  The fifteen jurors in the 2009 long-running Supreme Court trial I covered at Parramatta for a group of men accused of terrorism offences, gave up a year of their life. Those jurors had been empanelled from a potential jury pool of 5,000 people. Their empanelment took a week and that was only after the trial judge, Justice Anthony Whealy, delivered sixty-five judgments on pre-trial applications by prosecutors and the defence. Most of the judgments were on suppression orders that had been made.

  The trial was almost aborted when it was revealed that a woman who had been sitting near us in the public gallery each day had also been following the jurors to their cars after court finished in the afternoon and writing down their car registration details. The woman was related to one of the men on trial and the judge asked the jurors if her actions would have any influence on their deliberations. When they confirmed that her actions would not influence them, the trial continued, but the woman was banned from coming back to it.3

  15

  Foyers

  JUST SITTING IN THE foyer of a court waiting to go in can be an entertainment in itself. One morning, waiting in the foyer of the Downing Centre, I sat staring at a man in an over-sized, ill-fitting black suit. He was a smoker. His fingers were yellow and he reeked of cigarette smoke. Why was the suit so big? I guessed he might have borrowed it for his big day in court. Another woman in very high heels and a blue satin shirt with long, mesh sleeves sat doing her make-up and talking to a male solicitor. Her voice was shaky and high pitched with stress.

  ‘Stop saying cheers to me,’ she snapped at him. ‘It’s a stupid word. I hate it. People say cheers when they are having a drink.’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied as he went through some details of her case in a quiet voice that I couldn’t overhear.

  ‘If you need to go to the bathroom before we go in, it’s just through there,’ he said. She exploded.

  ‘I don’t want a bathroom! I want a fucking toilet! Why can’t you just call it a toilet, that’s what it is.’

  I thought to myself, it was going to be a long day for the solicitor and the magistrate hearing this case and that things weren’t off to a good start.

  There were lots of other people around me, some sitting in groups, some on their own, all waiting to go into different courts.

  On my left, two police officers sat quietly going through paperwork about a case. On my right were four young men who looked to be from the same family. They all wore T-shirts and jeans and sat with arms crossed in a row of seats on their own. I wondered if one of them was accused of a crime or if they were all going to court to eyeball a family member or friend whose case was being heard and who was in custody.

  A court official with big gold hoop earrings stuck her head out the door of one of the courtrooms.

  ‘Anyone need legal aid?’ she asked. No one moved. ‘Anyone pleading guilty?

  The man in the over-sized suit headed towards her and they chatted quietly for a few minutes before she directed him towards the legal aid office.

  The court official then looked up from the pile of papers in her hand and shouted.

  ‘Is there a Thai interpreter here? Is there a Thai interpreter?’

  There was no answer from those sitting around me so she turned around and headed back into the court she had come out of.

  Two lawyers waiting to get into the lift near my seat were talking about a client they referred to as ‘Cottees.’

  ‘Why do you call him that? a woman with them asked.

  ‘Read the label on the Cottees chocolate sauce bottle’ one of the men replied.

  The lift door opened and they got in.

  I googled Cottees on my phone and chuckled to myself when the label wording ‘Thick n rich’ came up.

  Tension that starts in a court public gallery can spill out into the foyer quickly so when I hear rival groups of supporters in court start talking in raised voices or giving each other finger signs from opposite sides of the room, I do a mental check list of court exit points.

  Heading into the Downing Centre Court in 2013 I saw a court sheriff intervene in a fight between two men out the front of the court. The sheriff had the sleeve of his shirt ripped off by one of them. Police officers quickly came to his aid and the fight was broken up.

  In April 2014 reporter Leonie Ryan witnessed a brawl that started in a Downing Centre courtroom and travelled quickly outside onto the footpath near Hyde Park. Supporters were in court for the case of three members of the same family who were convicted of offences that included assault and affray over a fight with police officers outside the family’s Bankstown home on New Year’s Day in 2013.

  One of the men started yelling at police from the dock as he was being taken away by court officers. His supporters then started punching and pushing officers outside the building, so a police emergency code was sent out and back-up was called in.1

  16

  Staying awake

  WINTER IS BY FAR the worst time for people falling asleep in a court public gallery. The heating is turned up high and if there’s a lull in the evidence, someone can be guaranteed to nod off and be heard snoring. I’ve seen many court watchers, and very occasionally, court officers, with their head slumped forward or turned to one side.

  In February 2012, in the public gallery of the Peter Slipper–James Ashby case in the Phillip Street court building, an elderly gentleman wearing a suit snored softly for a few minutes with an occasional twitch. There were a few giggles in the public gallery as people turned around to see where the noise was coming from.

  Suddenly he went quiet and seemed to stop breathing.

  Waiting outside the King Street Courthouse in December 2017. Photo by Steven Siewert.

  Fearing the worst, two reporters rushed over to him but he woke with a very loud start, prompting the judge to look up at what all the commotion was about.

  Winter is also when some of Sydney’s homeless people, who sleep around the Supreme Court buildings in King Street and around the Downing Centre in Liverpool Street sometimes try to sit in courts for a while to get warm. One winter I had an overcoat that I had hung over the back of a seat in the short matter court at the Downing Centre. I went outside for five minutes to file a story. When I came back in, the coat was gone.

  17

  Court watchers

  Robin Gandevia and Denis Sullivan

  Robin and Denis met in the public gallery of Court 3 at the Darlinghurst Courthouse in Taylor Square during the Gordon Wood murder trial in 2008. They hit it off straightaway and became the closest of friends and regulars together in court public galleries across Sydney, right up until Denis died on 18 March 2016 at the age of eighty-seven.

  After Denis’ passing, Robin continued to go to court on his own and sit through all the big cases. He is a walking encyclopaedia about murder trials, defamation cases, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and juries.

  Denis and Robin are what I call regular court watchers. They are a rare breed of mostly retirees or semi-retirees who, instead of kicking back at home, caravanning around Australia or becoming free babysitters for their grandchildren, come to court each day to see the justice system at work and be informed and entertained.

  The regular court watchers are, in my mind, set apart from the occasional
court drop-ins and excursion groups who come to cases from time to time. It is not unusual for the more seasoned court watchers to sit through every single day of a long-running case. The behaviour of the regular court watchers also sets them apart from the casual public gallery drop-ins who are sometimes not as respectful to the court staff and who are not familiar with the various court rituals.

  Regular court watchers know they have to turn their phones off, they don’t talk when the court is in session, bar the occasional whisper to a companion beside them and they hang off every word being said by the prosecutors, judges, defence lawyers and witnesses.

  They often exchange knowing ‘I told you so’ looks during a piece of evidence or huddle outside during the morning-tea break to discuss what’s just been heard in court.

  The regular court watchers mostly know all the reporters in court from the various media outlets and they have their favourites and ones they aren’t so fond of. They also usually know some of the court officers and sheriffs by name. There’s a sense of community between most of the court watchers and they have their favourite places to go for lunch to chat with their buddies around the court buildings.

  As the late Denis Sullivan used to say, pausing and taking a breath for dramatic effect, ‘Court is better than a movie or the theatre and it’s free, so why would you want to be anywhere else?’

  When I first noticed Denis and Robin at the Gordon Wood trial, I assumed they were friends of some of the witnesses. They were sitting with a large group of people in the downstairs section of the public gallery, and as the trial progressed, they came up to me at the end of some days to talk about my stories. Over the years, they became characters in the scenes I saw played out each day in courts across Sydney.

  As I got to know Robin and Denis, I learned little things about them and how they planned their court day. Over dinner at night they would look through lists of case names coming up on the Lawlink website together.

  Denis would say to Robin, ‘Put that name in the dirt box’, which was his way of saying ‘google it’ to find out if the case had the potential to be interesting to them.1

  Most of the regular court watchers I speak with are intelligent and compassionate people and I have often wondered why on earth they would willingly want to sit through some of the graphic and disturbing evidence that we reporters have to sit through some days, because it is our job.

  Seeing Robin and Denis in court so frequently and noticing them sometimes saying hello to prosecutors and defence lawyers outside court, there was always speculation among reporters about whether they were retired legal professionals; but as I got to know them during our conversations over the years, I realised they weren’t. They had gained their knowledge of cases and the court process by coming to court every day and they had an insatiable interest and curiosity about what was going on.

  In fact, Robin and Denis became such a permanent part of court life that on one occasion during the 2012 Peter Slipper– James Ashby case, media consultant Anthony McClelland, who was engaged by James Ashby’s lawyers to handle the media for him, ushered a group of reporters into a meeting room to give us his spin on the events of the court day.

  ‘Media only,’ he said, before looking at Denis and Robin. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘They’re with us,’ we replied and so into the briefing room they came.

  They had sat through more of the case than some of the reporters in the briefing room and I figured they deserved to be included.

  Denis was a true gentleman and a gentle soul who watched Supreme Court cases for almost forty years. He always wore beautiful quality hats and scarves to court in winter and yellow was his favourite colour. During the last few months of his life, he would get a bus from his retirement home and potter between the Law Courts building in Queens Square and the King Street Courthouse on his walking stick.

  My last meeting with him was outside one of the Robert Xie trials in the King Street Courthouse in late 2015. He had a grey and frail look about him but was, as always, polite and wise.

  After he retired he apparently got so bored he went back to work for the late flamboyant stockbroker Rene Rivkin for a year. This might have in part explained the fascination Denis had with the Gordon Wood murder trial because Wood used to be Rene Rivkin’s chauffer and Rivkin was mentioned often in evidence.

  Around the courts he always sought me out and said hello while I was setting up for a live television cross or sitting in the gutter trying to file a radio or online story.

  Denis would say, ‘I heard your court story last night’ or ‘I heard you reading the news on the weekend . . . your voice is so clear and you explain everything so well . . . very good.’

  He was encouraging and kind and he also sensed when I was busy and couldn’t talk for long.

  Once I asked Denis and Robin to do a radio interview on ABC Radio Sydney about what life is like as a court watcher. Robin hesitated doing that interview because he was concerned that other ABC listeners would learn how entertaining it was to be in a court and take up his favourite seats in the public galleries.

  ‘Jamelle, we don’t want them all here,’ he said.

  But he did a splendid job of the radio interview and talked to afternoon presenter James Valentine on air about how he loved coming to court with Denis. Robin was sincere, charming and very entertaining and James Valentine was highly amused.

  Very few people ever sit through a court case or see how our courts work first-hand. Yet we are all sometimes quick to criticise sentences given to offenders, to criticise juries for making decisions that we don’t agree with and to criticise the laws that we must abide by.

  ‘Why didn’t the judge lock him up for life?’

  ‘Why was that sentence so tough?’

  ‘Why did she get bail?’

  I get asked these questions all the time outside of work. Apart from family and children’s court matters, most public galleries are open to anyone, unless for some reason relating to sensitive material the judge declares a closed court.

  Robin often talks to me about the little things he notices judges do. One day he was appalled by a judge, who he said paid no attention to a victim impact statement at a sentencing hearing and just carried on with his paperwork.

  He says he and Denis sat through so many of former Supreme Court Judge Roderick Howie’s cases that when Justice Howie retired, he invited them to afternoon tea.2

  Writing a character reference for Robin to go into independent living in 2014, a senior prosecutor noted that he had met Robin in ‘quite strange and unusual circumstances, as a court watcher’ who he had spoken to at many trials. The prosecutor noted that Robin was a ‘polite, sincere and respectful man who has a deep interest in society and criminal justice.’ The referee said he had never seen Robin behave in an inappropriate manner when in court and that he had noticed on many occasions how caring he was to his older friend Denis.

  ‘I would think that Robin would be a very suitable applicant for a residence at your retirement village,’ he concluded.3

  Robin got into the retirement village.

  While always mindful of polite behaviour in court public galleries, Robin has confessed to me that on one occasion he and Denis had to leave a court because they couldn’t stop laughing. He said they walked into a trial where the defence was giving the final address to the jury. It was a case involving a Chinese man accused of murdering his wife, but who argued, he woke up and found her dead in bed beside him.

  According to Robin, the court heard that the man put his wife’s body in the boot of his car and then drove to a petrol station to get ice which he placed around the body.

  He apparently then bought some flowers and, according to Chinese tradition, had to place a favourite food around her body, so he purchased some lamingtons. He then buried his wife with the lamingtons before catching a plane to China.

  The man was eventually found guilty and Robin and Denis went back to court for his sentencing hearing. The judge,
who despite having a good sense of humour, chose not to mention the lamingtons in the sentence remarks, but although no disrespect was intended for the dead woman, they could not stop thinking about them and it was enough to set them off.4

  Robin and Denis mostly frequented murder trials and defamation cases, but on one occasion they decided to try a jurisdiction that wasn’t usually on their list. They sat in on sentencing submissions in the District Court section of the Downing Centre for a man convicted of historical child sex offences. Straight after giving his victim impact statement, a man who had been abused by the offender as a child, took a flying leap at him in the dock and started hitting him. Female friends of the victim and the offender then joined in the melee, hitting both men with their handbags.

  ‘There was make-up and hairbrushes and loose change flying all around the gallery before court staff broke the fight up,’ said Robin coming out of the building at the end of the day. ‘But the judge was very calm,’ he added.

  At the former ICAC building in Castlereagh Street, Robin and Denis used to lunch at the nearby Tattersalls Club. I was always promising that when I had time I would have lunch with them, but of course it never happened.

  Denis would say to Robin, ‘I wish she wouldn’t promise that because she’s always too busy.’

  Robin and Denis got a highly unusual lunch invitation themselves one day from a man nicknamed ‘Big Bear’ in a court, where three people were on trial for conspiracy to murder. After seeing them in the gallery day after day, Big Bear, who was one of the accused and a plasterer by trade and on bail, invited them out for a bite to eat. Robin had no idea why they got the invitation and he was curious about what Big Bear wanted, but Denis sensibly declined the invitation. Maybe the man was just lonely.