Jodi Arias Hung Jury #TrialMoments

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Many people have called a certain piece of video to my attention. They have seen it on CNN, InSession, all the major networks and anywhere video of the final moments of the Jodi Arias trial are shown. I've embedded one example of it below. It occurs at 3:07 within the ABC report on three of the jurors speaking out.

In the foreground of the video at 3:07 are the tearful faces of Samantha Alexander, Hilary Wilcox and  Tanisha Sorenson, all sisters of Travis Alexander. The jury verdict form has just been read out and the news that we had a hung jury is just sinking in.

The person in the background craning her neck and bobbing like a flamingo as the camera slowly pans the defeated and sorrowful sisters is me.

Did I know the camera was on me? Not even the slightest clue.

You may well wonder how that could be.

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Let me tell you what the set up is like inside the courtroom and it will become easy to understand. There is one standard television camera mounted on a tall tripod in the center of the very last row of the gallery. This is a court-mandated position. Dennis, the cameraman, is never free to roam about trying different angles. The position is fixed and if he tried to move it, court would have stopped, he would have been ejected and it's not unlikely all the cameras would have been thrown out as well.

I can't say for sure since I am inside the courtroom not watching on TV but I doubt you ever see this camera. You do see the fruits of its labor: straight on shots of the witness on the stand, the judge, wide shots of the overall action.

At the very opposite end of the courtroom are smaller more discreet video cameras mounted on the wall. There is no cameraman standing at them. They are remotely operated by an unseen crew who are not actually in the courtroom.

During the trial I have often tweeted about the "little room behind me," which was referring to the conference room where witnesses waited to be called or the Alexander family used for privacy in their grief and for conferences with prosecutor Juan Martinez. But I haven't mentioned the other little room behind the media section. This one is accessible by a door in the vestibule leading to the courtroom. Inside this room are collected the technical staff of the television team. They have monitors and controls in there. The cameras these guys operate are the ones pointed to the west, the ones that give you closeups of Jodi's face and of her family, of the attorneys facing the witness and of the Alexander family in the gallery.

Sometimes these cameras also capture the rest of us in the gallery. There is no red light flashing on the camera that's live, there is no whir of gears, no swiveling lens to alert us. Courts don't like such things. Cameras must be unobtrusive or most judges won't allow them. Even if you knew some subtle clue to watch for carefully, you would never notice it or you'd miss all the action of the trial itself.

People have asked what I was trying to see with my stretching and weaving. The answer is Jodi herself. There was an object obstructing my view of her and I was trying to get a better look by looking over the top of it, then I tried for an angle around the side of it. I could definitely see Jodi, I just couldn't see that much of her. A large chunk of her head was blocked from view by the object. If you pause the video at this point, behind me you can see Beth Karas of InSession and Grace Wong and Jean Casarez as well. To my right (your left) is Selin Darkalstanian and just to my left you can see the bowed head of Alexis Weed. We are all clumped together because this was the designated media section and we were not allowed to sit anywhere else.

What I'd like to point out to you now is the figure sitting directly in front of me. The camera angle tends to confuse these spatial relationships, but directly in front of me you can see a blue shoulder. The figure is hunched over, hands covering the face, brown hair falling forward to hide the rest. Moments before, this person (who I took particular note of as I sat) was sitting straight-backed as she always did, her quiet dignity always impressive. But when the news of the hung jury sunk in, in a sort of 2 second delay due to the convoluted language of the jury form, I saw the slow-motion rolling of the shoulders in front of me into a silent sob, the shoulders of Deanna Reid.

For me, this video preserves what I could not see no matter what kind of craning I did and that is what the front of what that sob looked like. It touches me very much, her sad elegance, and deep sense of privacy even in the most pubic of settings.

During the trial I sometimes used a hashtag #TrialMoments for little things I noticed. The announcement of the hung jury was a very big moment, it was real news. But it contained many small moments within it. The slow rolling of the blue-clad shoulders in front of me is one I will never forget.


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