Utah Court Rules – Published for Comment
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Posted: July 23, 2019
CJA04-0103. Civil Calendar Management. AMEND – Clarify mandate in rule language by removing reference to Utah Rules of Civil Procedure.
CJA04-0401.02. Possession and Use of Portable Electronic Devices. AMEND – Provides avenue for JPEC to conduct pilot program for conducting basic evaluation in certain justice courts using video recording and transmission.
The question first arises as to why there is any restriction on making a sound and/or sound-and-visual recording of public court proceedings.
1) Given that public court proceedings are (as their name plainly denotes) open to the public, there appears to be no good reason to prohibit a member of the public from recording public court proceedings.
2) Given that public court proceedings are recorded by the courts as public record, there appears to be no good reason to prohibit a member of the public from recording public court proceedings.
a) the court does not make its public-record recordings of public court proceedings available to the public free of charge. Instead, it requires one to pay $10 (the courts charge more money if the proceedings are more than an hour or so in length) and to wait up to 10 days for the recording to be delivered.
b) Some court clerks claim (erroneously) that if the recording is “too long” they cannot deliver the recording as an MP3 file by email and must instead deliver the recording on a CD and charge an additional fee to mail the recording to the one who requested the recording.
c) It is common knowledge that modern basic recording equipment (whether in the form of a dedicated portable recording device or smartphone or portable computer) records silently and without drawing attention to themselves or the recording process itself. And the technology is only getting cheaper, producing higher fidelity, and becoming more reliable as time goes by.
d) Thus, there is no good reason to make one i) pay $10; ii) wait up to 10 days; iii) pay an additional fee for mailing; and iv) wait additional time for mailing when one can (and should be permitted) to make one’s own recording of a public court proceeding, so long as one makes the recording 1) without disrupting the proceedings or 2) prejudicing the right of the parties to a fair proceeding.
3) Those who claim that the recording of public court proceedings (proceedings that the court itself already records as a matter of public record, mind you) *invade privacy* fail to bear in mind that by virtue of the public court proceedings being public, there is nothing private about public court proceedings.