The Hancock County, Mississippi, attorney has a problem.  Via WLOX,

A Hancock County attorney is taking legal action to force the county to fix the acoustics at the renovated courthouse. Jimmy McGuire filed a motion after a judge declared a mistrial last week in a case because jurors simply could not hear the attorneys or witnesses.

“This is the only courthouse in the State of Mississippi where you can’t hear yourself talk, hear the witnesses speak or hear the judge’s commands,” McGuire said.

That a judge was compelled to declare a mistrial is a pretty message that the courtroom isn’t working properly.  Whether the Hancock County courthouse, 102 years old but extensively repaired following Hurricane Katrina, is the only one in the state with problems may be subject to dispute. 

“The sound in there was such a bad echo you couldn’t hear the lawyers, you couldn’t hear the judge, you couldn’t hear the witnesses,” Caston said. “You found yourself trying to infer what everybody was saying, especially the witnesses.”

It’s a good thing, a wonderful thing, that the sound was so bad that it compelled the judge to declare a mistrial.  Consider what it means for the rest of the spectrum. those courtrooms where jurors can hear most of the testimony, except when a juror speaks quickly or softly, or when a chair scrapes the floor, or a court officer coughs, or a judge whispers to his law secretary, or about a thousand other sound distractions in the room. 

Jurors are allowed to raise their hand to let the judge know that they can’t hear.  Some judges will tell them so.  Others won’t.  But rarely will a juror interrupt testimony, and it’s not until things get really bad before a hand goes up.  Then the rest of the panel nods in agreement, as none of them were able to hear.  And the obvious question is, what did they miss before they reached the point where it was so bad that they had to take the chance of looking like a pain by raising their hand? 

Courtrooms have long been designed to accommodate a relatively large number of people in the audience, even though there usually are no more than a handful present for a trial.  They are designed to be grand, to reflect the majesty of the law and the authority of the courts.  Rarely is the setting what one might call intimate.

Some rooms have the most amazing acoustics, where you can hear a pin drop in one corner from the other side of the room.  I’ve got no clue how they do that, but I’m here to tell you that it can be done.  In other rooms, it’s like being in a cavern, and it’s essentially impossible to clearly hear testimony from ten feet away. 

Courtrooms, at least where I’ve been, are largely set up the same way, with the jury box on one side of the room, dictating that the witness stand be on that side of the bench.  The prosecution table will be on the side of the room with the jury, and the defense on the side distant from the witness stand and jury box.  They won’t let the defendant to close to anybody.  Just in case.

Consequently, the defendant tends to be the furthest away from the witness of everybody in the room.  Defense counsel is often constrained to move around, sometimes over to the prosecution table, to hear the witness’ testimony.  When this happens, by definition the defendant can’t hear the testimony against him.  At least not clearly and completely.  But nobody, outside of the defendant and occasionally his lawyer, cares much about that.  The primary concern is the jury.

The core problem here is that we need and expect every word spoken by a lawyer and witness, question and answer or argument, to be clearly heard by every juror.  There’s no assurance that this is the case.  In the Hancock County courthouse, the problem was bad enough that the judge was forced to declare a mistrial.  What of all the other courthouse, courtrooms, where it’s not quite as bad?  How many words are missed?  How many words need to be missed before judges see a problem?

Across the country, we’re dealing with courtrooms build years, often decades ago, when the concern for acoustics may not have been a primary architectural focus.  Since construction, many courtrooms have been diced and sliced to keep pace with the volume of cases, where numbers of rooms trumped concern for sound.  Building new courthouses is a very expensive and time consuming proposition, and frequently not on the top of every legislator’s money list.  You don’t get many votes for funding the construction of a new courthouse.

Yet it’s not much of a trial when the jury can’t hear the testimony.  All of it.

H/T Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch