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57 Judicature 111 (1973-1974)
Keeping an Eye on the Courts in Massachusetts

handle is hein.journals/judica57 and id is 113 raw text is: Keeping an Eye on the Courts in Massachusetts Ernest Winsor and Edgar A. Dunn For more than two years now, small groups of concerned Massachusetts citizens have been keeping a watchful eye on their state's lower criminal courts. Organized court watching in Massachusetts got its effective start in January, 1971. At that time a staff attorney of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute was asked by the American Friends Service Committee to train interested lay persons in the pro- cedures of the Massachusetts District Courts. Court watching did not originate in Mas- sachusetts. It had previously been attempted with some success in Connecticut1 and in Chester, Pennsylvania, a poverty-impacted city about 15 miles south of Philadelphia. Groups of women, whose trademark is their white gloves, sit in on court proceedings in Louisiana. The Chester court watchers, eventually numbering some 200 people, were organized by the Friends Suburban Project, and had had some ameliorating effect on the harshness of the local magis- trate's court. Their most dramatic success was the introduction of benches in the courtroom so that defendants and audience alike could sit down. Many of these prior court watching proj- ects had been mainly atmospheric in their purposes-that is, they had tried, simply by having middle-class people sit and watch the court, to tone down the verbal brutality with which defendants were treated. But the Massachusetts court watchers had a more definite goal. They planned to monitor 1. See Kirchmeier, Connecticut Court Watchers, Brief. case, April, 1969. and report as precisely as possible the pro- cedural fairness of the lower court judge and to gather data on how the courts were run. A report of their findings would be submitted to the proper judicial authorities and then publicly aired. Court watching is only one part of the growing popular movement to aerate and demythologize our institutions, be they courts, universities, government bureaucra- cies, hospitals or corporations. The federal Freedom of Information Act represents one aspect of the movement, Campaign GM another. People are increasingly unwilling to take the high priests of any profession at their word that they are working in the public interest. SHOCKED The lower criminal courts are ripe for public scrutiny. The 1967 President's Crime Commission was ... shocked by what it has seen in some lower courts. It has seen cramped and noisy court- rooms, undignified and perfunctory procedures, and badly trained personnel ... It has seen as- sembly line justice.2 It was clear to the Massachusetts organ- izers from the beginning that lay persons would have to be the main observers. Ac- tually, lawyers would have been better: they would not need as much training, their observations would be more discriminating, and their ability to reduce their observations to coherent English prose would be notice- ably better. But lawyers are busy people-- 2. The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, 128.

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