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3. Stenographic Reporting for the Court System
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter 3 Stenographic Reporting for the Court System Court reporting is a mystery profession. Attorneys and, even, judges oftentimes are ignorant of the actual work involved in producing a transcript. Sandra McFate, court reporter, 1973 The year 1959 was a busy one for Alaska. Having just attained statehood under the approval of the Eisenhower administration, the former territory was now faced with the daunting task of quickly setting up a modern bureaucratic apparatus that would meet the requirements of federal law. In particular, Alaska needed to construct, equip, and staff an entire state court system. But besides building courtrooms, appointing judges, and hiring lawyers, Alaska court administrators would have to attract and employ a very particular, highly skilled, and relatively obscure group of laborers: court reporters. These were the men (mostly, at that time) who, using either manual (pen-based) or machine (keyboard-based) stenographic skills, sat silently at the side of the bench and diligently recorded every word that was said in a courtroom case. But their work did not end there; often, after the taking down of testimony during working hours at a salaried rate, came the writing up of that testimony during off-hours at a per-page rate, selling the resulting “verbatim transcript” to plaintiffs, defendants, the media, or the court itself.1 The dual-income structure of court reporting was a long-standing practice that, by midcentury, many court managers sought to end—and the situation in Alaska offered them a unique opportunity to do it. Early in 1959, Buell Nesbett, chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court, traveled to Washington, DC, to discuss the situation with administrative director of the federal courts Warren Olney III. Just a year earlier, the Judicial Conference of the United States—the policy makers of the federal judiciary, comprising judges from the Supreme Court, the US district courts, the US Courts of Appeals, and the US bankruptcy courts—had conducted an “independent investigation of the court reporting system in the federal courts,” published by Olney’s of- fice, which came out “strongly in favor of the use of sound recording” to capture the legal record.2 Thus Olney suggested a bold technological (and spatial) fix: instead of importing court reporters to the remote northern state, Alaska could purchase tape recorders.3 Soon after this meeting, the Connecticut-based Soundscriber corporation , makers of a new electromagnetic recording system that could capture sixteen hours of speech on a slow-moving, three-inchwide belt, was awarded a thirty-thousand-dollar contract to wire new courtrooms in Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Together with the new technology came a new physical courtroom design. The Anchorage court was designed as a “nearly acoustically perfect recording studio,” a circle full of carpeting, sound-deadening ceiling tiles, rubber-mounted doors and wood-slat baffled walls.4 But this architecturally integrated recording system was hardly labor-free: the Anchorage court required the labor of three full-time “young girls” as transcribers, each turning out an average of fifteen pages of transcript per day and earning between $485 and $550 per month. Labor turnover was endemic: “A transcriber on the average works for 4 to 6 months and then leaves.”5 But the labor of supposedly “unskilled” female transcribers was cheaper and easier to control than the labor of self-avowed professional male court reporters who could command a wage of five to fourteen thousand per year—not including transcript fees.6 Not surprisingly, Olney praised the Alaska experiment in a forty-three-page report “sent to all US circuit and district judges,” arguing that “when the service provided by conventional shorthand reporters is inadequate, overly expensive, or otherwise unsatisfactory, electronic sound recording is a practical alternative.”7 Not surprisingly, the National Shorthand Reporters Association (NSRA) claimed just the opposite: “Any system of recording proceedings in substitution or in lieu of the shorthand reporter is unsatisfactory.”8 Electronic recording, or ER as it was called, was certainly not perfect; the Soundscriber soon acquired the nickname “sound scratcher.”9 But the court reporters had reason to worry. “Make no mistake about it,” wrote one reporter in 1967, “the future is not going to see a happy combination of recording machines in court104 Turning Speech into Text [44.200.182.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:11 GMT) rooms alongside of official court reporters; rather, it is going to be either one or the other.”10 The taking down of live testimony in coded form, to be turned...