Florida Court Airs Trial on Web
Reuters
3:00 a.m. 16.Aug.99.PDT
When 68-year-old Shirley Egan goes on trial on Monday on charges of fatally shooting her
daughter, the ailing woman will be center stage in the first trial the US judicial system
has ever broadcast over the Internet.
Media organizations previously have aired trials over the World Wide Web, but
industry sources said Egan's trial marks the first time that a local court system has put
its own proceedings on the Internet.
"We look at it as a way of making a public proceeding even more
public," Matt Benefiel, the court administrator.
"Courtroom 23 of Florida's Orange County Courthouse, where the trial will
take place, was designed for the 21st century, fully wired for audio and video, with
fiber-optics and an Internet server that allows Web broadcasts of proceedings.
The courtroom was designed for high profile cases like the Egan trial. Egan is
accused of shooting her daughter, Georgette Smith, 42, in the neck last March while Smith
and her boyfriend discussed putting Egan into a nursing home.
The defendant suffers from emphysema and numerous other health complaints.
The case made headlines last May when Smith, who was paralyzed from the neck
down by the gunshot, petitioned a judge to allow doctors to terminate her life-support.
After Smith gave a tearful deposition that will be played during Egan's trial,
doctors turned off her ventilator and she died. Egan has said the shooting was an accident
and that she fired the gun to get her daughter's attention.
Prosecutors threatened to upgrade Egan's attempted murder charge to murder after
Smith died, but decided not to when Smith forgave her mother during the videotaped
deposition.
The Internet system at the Orange County Courthouse was tested during a recent
hearing on Florida's electric chair, which was being challenged as a cruel and unusual
form of punishment after several gruesome executions in recent years.
"We didn't advertise it or announce it at all and we still got thousands of
hits on the server," Benefiel said.
Since then, his office has been flooded with calls from courthouses expressing
interest in the technology.
"Technically, it was not as difficult as we thought it would be," he
said.
Court employees discovered they could broadcast live on the Internet from any
courtroom in the building using fixed security cameras and an audio system designed for
teleconferencing.
Trial coverage over the Internet is not entirely new. Court TV has been
simulcasting on the Internet some of the trials covered by the cable television network
for some time.
Broadcast.com, which provides media programming over the Internet, broadcast
President Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony on the Web as it was being released to the
public.
Richard Georges, a St. Petersburg, Florida, attorney specializing in Internet
issues, said the move by the judicial system to air its own court proceedings "opens
up a new era of courtroom access."
He said issues of fairness and confidentiality would probably be raised, as they
were when broadcast and cable networks first aired trials. But Georges predicted the
concerns would not keep the new technology out of the courtroom.
"Anything that makes the court system more open is going to be seen as a
good thing, since it was designed to be open," he said.
Copyright
1999 Reuters Limited
Causation in Murder: Shooting in Florida Presents Unique Twist
Dateline: 05/27/99
Georgette Smith likely is the first crime victim in the United States to do
something to hasten death, and in doing so, raise the prospect of more serious charges
against her attacker.
This strange case arose in March in Orlando, Florida, when Shirley Egan, age 68,
overheard her daughter, Georgette Smith, 42, talking with her husband about putting Ms.
Egan into an assisted care nursing home. Ms. Egan became enraged and shot at them, hitting
the daughter in the neck and causing her to become a quadriplegic.
Ms. Egan was charged with Attempted Murder.
Meanwhile, Ms. Smith pursued legal action to allow her ventilator to be turned
off, citing precedent allowing competent patients to refuse medical treatment even if it
would result in their death. Ultimately, Ms. Smith's wish was granted, she was removed
from her ventilator, and shortly thereafter, she died.
Now that the victim has died, the prosecutor is threatening to upgrade the
charge against Ms. Egan to Murder.
This has created a firestorm of debate from various camps over the issue of
whether the shooting was a sufficient cause of the death for it to be legally considered
murder. It is particularly interesting debate because of the fact that the victim herself
made the choice to terminate life support.
What do you think? If a criminal act puts the victim in a position of choosing
to live a life on permanent life support or allowing herself to die, did the act cause the
death? At what point, if any, does medical treatment end the causation? Assuming there is
something like a one-year statute of limitations on deaths resulting from criminal acts (a
definition in a murder statute that requires a death to be within one year of the criminal
act for the act to be considered a homicide), how does the victim's choice to die sooner
than she otherwise would affect the charge?
It appears Ms. Smith could have lived indefinitely on life support. What if a
victim simply refuses antibiotics and dies of an infection resulting from a relatively
minor injury?
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