Remember the Darlie Routier case — the Rowlett woman who’s on Texas’ death row for the 1996 stabbing death of one of her boys? Remember how the error-riddled trial transcript delayed the appeal process and raised doubts about its integrity?
Then you’ll want to read the rest of this blog post.
“Court administrators would have difficulty justifying courts’ continued dependence on stenographic reporting if they were to describe the process by which the majority of state trial courts create, produce, and maintain the official record of the hundreds of thousands of court proceedings annually,” a national association of court officials concludes.
The Conference of State Court Administrators‘ report begins with provocative questions. What, it asks, would ordinary people say “if they learned that thousands of staff are assigned to individual courtrooms to make this manual record even though few cases are appealed? How might they react if they learned that the manual recording of those proceedings is made in a media that could be interpreted into written English only by the individual making the record?