Page 63 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

54 Christina Spiesel

and attending to what is observable in the piece of video. (Readers are
encouraged to view for themselves.)
And it is video, a very particular form of video, that concerns me here –
that generated by Tasers, (ECDs, or electronic control devices or stun guns),
when they are equipped with recording devices that document their use – what
I will call tasercam video. Taser International markets this equipment to move
interactions involving police use of Tasers from ―he said/she said‖ claims to
more evidence-based records that permit review of the circumstances of police
use of Tasers post-deployment. 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 extremely
potent and limited nature, we need to pay more attention to the media effects,
not less, with tasercam video.

VIDEO IN LAW

Inexpensive and easy to use video technology has made it possible for
video to move out of television studios, and its use is now ubiquitous and
pervasive: institutions and persons in the street record whatever they choose to
turn their cameras on. So audiences are becoming accustomed to seeing video
that is no longer just a vehicle for news and drama on television, which are
controlled for production values and are highly edited to create and sustain
audiences. They are used to seeing video clips that may be hard to see, that
may have bad audio, that stop and start chaotically, that feature mundane or
unusual content that someone somewhere thought was interesting for whatever
personal reasons. This is web video on YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, and
so on. This is the context for the emerging legal video culture – not the stuff of
law and film, with its clear narratives and complex expression of its themes –
but video entangled at every level of legal culture and practice.
Courts, like the rest of society, use available technology to help
accomplish various functions. Video is used to document court proceedings
(even, at times, to substitute for court stenography), present evidence
(particularly depositions, visits to scenes, and sometimes reenactments) and
increasingly to enable distance-appearances – of incarcerated defendants,
witnesses who may not be available otherwise due to our global economy, and
for official recordings of confessions [Gower]. Or video may itself be
evidence. Any newer video forms are going to fit into this ―videoscape‖ of
common uses of the technology and their affiliated social practices. In general,