Courtroom Sketching: Reflections

on History, Law and the Image

By Lynda Nead
History of Newspapers
and Media in Law
 The Trial – A Spectacle
The end of the 19th Century witnessed what the Author, Lynda Nead describes
as, “Victorian melodrama with the added frisson of real life.”

Major criminal Trials were reported in sordid detail in ways such as

photographic spreads, banner headlines and hectic prose in order to draw
readers into compelling narratives of desire, betrayal, violence.

By the 20th Century, the Criminal Trial had become a spectacle, with the media
mostly via newspapers, bringing the drama of the trial to mass audiences.

The drama of the Trial came into its own when the Criminal Evidence Act of
1898 gave the Accused the right to give evidence on their own behalf, thus
making the cross-examination of the Accused the centerpiece of the Trial.
Trials offered the media the perfect story- a complete
self-contained narrative sans delays, legal niceties,
dramatic lacunae and lapses of interest which occur
during a courtroom trial.

By the 1920s, any person connected with a trial was

fair game for the media, with murder trials being of
particular interest due to the sensational nature of the
offence, and its potentially provocative storyline(s)

Verdicts often resulted in public demonstrations and

petitions to the Home Secretary.
 Women and The Trial
Women were of particular importance to this
phenomenon of the sensationalized criminal trial -
from being the most voracious consumers of the trial
based tabloids sold by newspapers to being a major
selling point if they were any part of a trial.

The proximity of women to the success of a trial as a

story told by the media will be highlighted in the case
of R v. Bywaters and Thompson.
 R v. Bywaters and Thompson

A case which perfectly

encapsulates the way in
which the media turned
trials into tabloids
 Facts
In October of 1922, Edith and Percy
Thompson, a married couple were returning
home from the theatre in London when a
man attacked and killed Percy with a knife.

Edith and a man named Frederick Bywaters,

with whom she was having an affair were
charged, tried, convicted and hanged for the
murder.

A Public Petition for commuting Edith’s

death sentence was rejected by Home
Secretary.
 Portrayal in the Press
This case was one in which elements (such as the two accused
having an adulterous affair, love letters written by Edith to
Bywaters, the fact that Bywaters was young and handsome, and
Edith a married woman older than him,) guaranteed a sensational
story for the media to tell.

The author, Lynda Nead has described it as ‘A tawdry and explicit

true-life tale of crime and passion.’

An important point to note is that although Bywaters never

admitted to killing Percy, the notoriety of this case rested largely
on Edith Thompson due to media focus and thus public perception.
A woman accused was
fascinating in that it presented
an opportunity for public
examination of the nature of
modern femininity and the
pathology of female violence.

A photogenic story: The case

hung on the relationship
between the two defendants and
called out for revealing and
lifelike portraits.
Appearance and demeanour were reported in detail
and scrutinized for signs of innocence/guilt

The trial at the Old Bailey aroused public interest in a

manner that was unprecedented at that time, and
reached its climax at the point of Edith’s cross-
examination. Her life, and letters reconstructed
during this cross – examination were published in
newspapers like ‘recreations of a cheap novel.’
The courtroom could neither extract itself from the
sensational news reporting of the trial, nor could it
sustain its image as a pure space for the exercise of
justice.

The Court was thus drawn into a world of petit

bourgeois sexual fantasy and transgression
symbolized by Edith and magnified though the mass
readership of the 20th Century popular press.
 The Role of Women
The potential drama of this trial in terms of its appeal to
the masses was exacerbated by the various women who
were a part of this trial, and the particular attention paid
to them by the press.

Witnesses: Two women-the manager of a tea shop and a

waitress were witnesses in this case, and were focused on
heavily by the press. Their photographs featured alongside
those of the Judge, Defendants and their Lawyers.
The Juror: One of the members of the jury for the trial was a woman, and
she was also heavily featured by the press.

A photograph of her in particular, which was printed by the press in

which she was attending Church with the rest of the jurors and dressed in
formal attire-furs and a black hat bore similarities to Edith Thompson.

The press using such a photograph was one which highlights the way in
which the media had turned a murder trial into a spectacle that
compromised respectability and judgment.

Moreover, the effect this, as well as the nature of the focus on the female
juror meant that the many women who were a part of this trial thus
seemed indistinguishable.

Lynda Nead, on this point observes that 'Modernity had disturbed the
certainties of the Courtroom.
 A newspaper, The Daily Graphic juxtaposed a photograph of Edith
Thompson and two details of women in the crowd (of spectators) captioning
it,

'Among the crowd are to be seen many women in furs and young girls of the
age at which the present generation is, as a rule, chiefly interested in the
dramas of the film’.

Fashion and fiction had united these women, spectacle and speculation
brought about Edith Thompson's downfall as this sensational story created a
narrative of her and this case that may have never even been accurate in the
first place.

The case of R v. Bywaters and Thompson shows how far the courtroom had
been infiltrated by modern mass culture and the extent to which it was
consumed through the narrative structures of theatre, film and photography,
and thus how trials were turned into tabloids.
Photography and
the Courtroom
 Role of Photographs

The English Courtroom witnessed two things:

1. The development of adversarial trials and;
2. the rise of mass circulation press

Circulation had increased mainly due to the introduction of

direct reproduction of photographic images in news reporting

Daily Reporter became the first newspaper in the world to be

illustrated only by photographs

Tabloid newspapers started using highly illustrated front

pages, dramatic photographs and bold headlines 
 The Press Photographer

The press photographer emerges as a ‘new hero of modern life’

Now editorial staffs had a separate position for picture editors and new
agencies were often joined by special picture agencies

John Everard, a press photographer and the author of Photographs for the
Papers: How to Take and Place them, while advising the photographers
stated- “Photographers with a desire for sensationalism will find plenty to do
in  following up criminal cases. A certain section of the daily press and
weekend papers make a special feature of such reproductions. In the provinces
there is also a large market for photographs of murder scenes and sensational
pictures.”
 Intrusion by the Press

Many a times photographs were taken even if prohibited by the

judge; as photographers found ways to sneak in cameras and
take photographers irrespective

Melodrama had contaminated justice and justice had been

reduced to little more than a source of entertainment for the
masses

Everard predicted that a change would be brought in when

photographing without permission would be made into a
separate offence.
 The Criminal Justice Act 1925
 Members of the Parliament felt that the press had turned great legal and moral narratives into
a profit driven circus

Courtroom photography was no longer an isolated phenomena but rather a part of the trial
itself. 

Therefore, to separate the two the Criminal Justice Act 1925 was introduced. 

The Criminal Justice Act 1925:

Section 41 of the Act created two separate offences-
1. the making of an image and; 
2. publication of such images

The prohibition covered making images not only in the courtroom but also within the building
and its premises. 

This clause remains the prevailing law in the U.K. even now.  
 Courtroom
Sketch Artists
Courtroom Sketch and the identity of
the Artist
The courtroom sketch is highly generic; it obeys rules
and conventions that subordinate the particular details of
individual cases and identities within general categories
of types and location.

And the identity of the individual artists become

submerged within a generic category of ‘courtroom
artist’.

The sketch declares its status as ‘an artist’s impression’,

but we have no idea who the artist is.
Representation of the Courtroom to the
masses

Predominant and general ideas of the courtroom

insulated in people.

Courtroom dramas on film and television provides an

image of the legal process which can be mobilized by
the viewer of the courtroom sketch.

The sketch itself is a pseudo mode of analysing the

other fictional representations.
 The sketch does not depict what actually happened
in the courtroom but what the impression it made
on a viewer by the scene
The gap between the actual trial and its
representation

Predominant ideas surrounding the OJ Simpson

case.

The decision in 1995 to allow television cameras to

depict the O.J. Simpson trial—Simpson was accused
of killing ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her
friend, Ron Goldman—seemed to signal a new and
relaxed policy about media coverage in courtrooms.
“I thought that was it, the swan song of sketching,”
Edwards says. “Then it turned out to be a joke.”
The sketch is thus a testimony to the partial
and incomplete nature of portrayal and to
law’s regulation of the visual image.

Pitfall of having cameras in the courtroom

A sketch is an interval which acknowledges

that what we see is representation made and
composed rather than a transparent
transmission of the whole truth.