January 18. 2010

Prop. 8 trial will come to YouTube after all, via reenactment

trial Clipart via Florida Center for Instructional Technology

A week ago, the US Supreme Court overruled the judge in the case and said that video from the Prop. 8 trial in San Francisco cannot be distributed for public viewing.

But there’s more than one way to show a trial on TV and a Los Angeles filmmaker says that he and a team of actors are ready to reenact the trial from court transcripts and to distribute the reenactment to a website and on YouTube, LA Weekly reports.

The filmmaker, John Ireland, put out a call on Craigslist for actors to portray the various parties to the suit, including pro-equality lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, US District Judge Vaughn Walker, and anti-gay attorney Charles Cooper, among others. As of Monday, 25 actors had responded to the call, NBC Bay Area reports.

From the station’s report:

Using partial transcripts and blogs from the trial, Ireland and his team put together a script. They started with opening statements and plan to keep going until a verdict is read.

Just a few days into the project, his band of volunteers are hunkered down at the campus of USC reading off prompters, telling a story they hope viewers will find compelling.

Ireland said he is not editorializing the trial and is trying to “hold true to each witness” who takes the stand.

More...

Posted by NewsEditor -- 18 Jan 2010 3:57 PM (PT)

Comments (0)

Notre Dame editor resigns over paper’s homophobic cartoon

image    ::: A student editor of Notre Dame’s campus newspaper, The Observer, has resigned after apologizing for an anti-gay cartoon published last Wednesday by the paper, WSBT TV reports. In a letter published in today’s paper, Kara King, the paper’s assistant managing editor, blamed another editor for failing to show her the cartoon prior to publication, but added, “[N]o excuse can justify the comic even being considered for publication, and the duty to censor it fell to me. I failed to do so, and am solely responsible for providing a forum for this message of hate.” On Friday, the paper printed an editorial apologizing for running the comic strip. The paper’s editor in chief, Jenn Metz said, “I was personally outraged and extremely offended that something of that nature had been printed in our paper,” South Bend Tribune reports. The three panel strip was created by three seniors at the university. In the first panel of Wednesday’s strip, a character asks, “What is the easiest way to turn a fruit into a vegetable?” The answer in the final panel is, “A baseball bat.” The comic strip’s creators Colin Hofman, Jay Wade, and Lauren Rosemeyer, apologized for the cartoon in a letter published Friday, saying their strip relies on “shock value” but adding, “now … we have gone too far.”  The Observer said today that the strip will no longer appear in the paper. Also on Friday, Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John Jenkins, said the university “denounces the implication that violence or expressions of hate toward any person or group of people is acceptable or a matter that should be taken lightly”.

Posted by NewsEditor -- 18 Jan 2010 2:46 PM (PT)

Comments (0)

Significance of high-court's ban on broadcast of Prop 8 trial

prop-8-trial When he ruled earlier this month that video of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial—aka Prop 8 trial—could be distributed on YouTube, Judge Vaughn Walker said that public viewing of the high-profile trial would be a civics lesson. But the lawyers for the Yes-on-8 campaign who are defending the initiative in court loudly complained that their witnesses would be too frightened to express themselves honestly in court if the public could watch what they say.

image A test video on YouTube showed the format that would have been used for broadcast of the Prop. 8 trial (Technicians sit in for the courtroom for the test run.)

Prop. 8's defenders appealed to the US Supreme Court, which last week ruled in a split decision that distribution of the trial’s video will not be allowed.

NPR's On the Media program discusses the significance of the high court decision. The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, says that even though the court narrowly decided the issue based on court procedures, their decision nonetheless sent a message about where the Court stands in the debate over cameras in the courts.

The court’s conservative majority, which voted to block the cameras, suggested in its decision that it had been moved by the Prop 8 team’s argument about harassment. Although the broader significance of that isn’t discussed in this clip, that could portend problems for related cases in which right-wing political groups are asking courts to grant them increased secrecy in their campaigns, including a request to keep names of referendum petition signers secret in Washington.

In a Huffington Post column published today, Karen Ocamb analyzes that aspect of the decision.

[Hear the NPR report on the decision after the break]

More...

Posted by NewsEditor -- 18 Jan 2010 10:29 AM (PT)

Comments (0)

MD hate crime victim wronged again by state board

Site: Baltimore Sun 
Article: Gay man is victimized twice, by killer and state
Author: Peter Herman

Glen H. Footman was shot twice on a Mount Vernon, Maryland street in September 2008 while walking hand-in-hand with his longtime partner, Alex Chavarria. After more than a year of rehabilitation and multiple surgeries, Footman died of his injuries last November.

Maryland’s criminal compensation fund pays some bills for the following:

•An innocent victim of a crime who has suffered a physical injury (includes sexual assault and child abuse) and has at least $100 in nonreimbursable expenses or has lost at least two straight weeks of work.
•A surviving spouse or child of a homicide victim.
•A person who is dependent on support provided by a homicide victim.
•A victim (or the surviving family) of an international terrorist attack.
•A victim (or the surviving family) of a hit-and-run, drunk driver or a driver intentionally using a vehicle as a weapon.
•A person who is killed or injured while trying to prevent a crime (includes the surviving family).
•A person who is killed or injured while giving aid to a law enforcement officer performing his official duties (also applies to a person giving aid to a firefighter being obstructed in the performance of his official duties).
•A person who paid or assumed responsibility for the funeral expenses of a homicide victim.

While he was in the rehabilitation center, Footman, 52, spent hours filling out forms for compensation under Maryland’s criminal compensation fund, but the board that oversees the program did not act on Footman’s application before his death. It now says it cannot offer the compensation to Chavarria because the couple, who were together for 13 years, weren’t married.

Baltimore police classified Footman’s shooting as a possible hate crime but have not made any arrests, Baltimore Sun reports.

Chavarria told police that a young man stopped to ask Footman a question or bum a cigarette, and then shot him. Witnesses told police that they had overheard the assailant saying, “I’m going to kill myself a gay tonight.”

In his Baltimore Sun feature on the case, Peter Herman calls Footman “a true victim if there ever was one in Baltimore”. The state’s compensation board was created to help victims of crime like Footman, but Herman discovered a tale of bureaucratic fumbling in the case:

More...

Posted by NewsEditor -- 18 Jan 2010 9:01 AM (PT)

Comments (0)