Page 60 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

In: Courting the Media: Contemporary … ISBN: 978-1-61668-784-7
Editors: Geoffrey Sykes © 2010 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 4

THE FATE OF THE ICONIC SIGN:
TASER VIDEO

Christina Spiesel
Yale Law School, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

Legal practitioners, like many people, can betray a naïve belief that
photographs are direct representations of ―the real‖ and that a picture will
communicate facts about reality directly to its audience. This arises from
a belief that these pictures will reveal truths about which we can all agree
because they describe a commonly shared perceptual reality captured by a
mechanism that we believe has no desires of its own: the camera.
Photographs are commonly understood to have been caused by the
phenomena before the camera, light carrying information and imprinting
it on a sensitive surface that can the enable the picture to be prepared for
display. Photographers know that this is a misconception but the general
public does not seem to share that awareness.
Video made with a lens (and therefore presenting viewers with 29.97
photographic frames a second) will be the concern of this chapter – in
particular, a very particular form of video, that generated by Tasers
(electrical stun guns) when they are equipped with recording devices. In
particular, police forces are encouraged to equip their Tasers with this
capacity so that the conditions of their deployment can be reviewed later.
I call this tasercam video. I will discuss, briefly, the landscape of legally
relevant video and then discuss the characteristics of this kind of video in
particular, concluding with some thoughts on why, even given its