With any murder trial there are the gawkers. Members of the public who arrive on a Monday when the trials are doled out and work out which is the juiciest case to sit into. They’re not allowed into rape trials (under the In Camera rule only bona fide members of the press and interested parties are allowed into these) but if there is a murder you can bet they’ll come out from under their stones as soon as the jury take their seats.
Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called The Crowd. It’s about the people who come and stare at traffic accidents. He casts them, not as simple ghouls, but as force of nature with power of life and death. These are the people who raise of lower the thumb to decide if the victim lives or dies. It’s one of his most disturbing stories.
When you see the same faces sitting in the back of the court, trial after trial after trial it’s hard not to think of the Bradbury crowd. They come in every morning, pick a prime spot, usually in the middle of the extended family of victim or accused and settle in. The more gruesome the evidence the closer they lean. Well I suppose it beats daytime TV.
Now before you say it, I know I do the same thing. I sit through a trial day after day and have been known to grade trials according to their degree of interest. But there’s a difference. A big one. I’m paid to sit there and as a freelance, if the trial’s not interesting enough I’m not going to earn much money. I don’t do it for entertainment.
The hard core of the rubber neckers will get quite militant about their right to attend open trials if, in a packed courtroom they are urged to move to the upstairs gallery available for the public. They will treat the journalists with contempt, as if we are a corrupt filter attempting to stop them from accessing their god given constitutional right. They intend to exercise this constitutional right…in the Joe O’Reilly trial they brought sandwiches.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favour of the public having access to the courts. I think everyone should sit through a trial, to understand what goes on and see how everything works. Not to mention that justice should absolutely happen in public (the reason for our attendance in rape trials – as the eyes, so to speak.)
The thing I have a problem with are the people who come again and again and again and watch with such relish. In a case like the current one, in which a 17-year-old girl was found strangled and semi naked on wasteground, these watchers seem particularly inappropriate.
This isn’t entertainment. It shouldn’t be viewed as such. But the same faces in the Crowd will always come back for more. This won’t be the last trial they come to and nothing I say will put them off. They are a fact of public justice. But like Bradbury’s preternatural chorus the Dublin contingent creep me out.
