CourtTV Fans Await Verdict

With jurors resuming deliberations today in the murder trial of ex-Harvard graduate student Alexander Pring-Wilson, the national media spotlight shines on the Cambridge courtroom where the three-week trial came to a close Thursday.

Pring-Wilson has admitted to fatally stabbing local teen Michael D. Colono in a fight outside a Western Avenue pizzeria last year—although defense lawyers say that Pring-Wilson acted to save his own life.

Pring-Wilson’s background—he is the son of prominent attorneys and spoke five languages—makes him “an atypical criminal defendant,” says Savannah Guthrie, the CourtTV correspondent who has covered the trial for the cable network.

But CourtTV, which has broadcast the Pring-Wilson proceedings to viewers nationwide, initially didn’t plan to cover the trial live.

At summer’s end, Guthrie was returning from a Cape Cod vacation and gearing up to report on the sexual assault trial of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant.

“We can usually only cover one live trial at a time,” Guthrie says. And as dramatic as the Pring-Wilson trial has proved to be, it wouldn’t have garnered the same sort of obsessive national interest that the Bryant case sparked.

But on Sept. 1, a judge in Eagle, Colo., dismissed the case against Bryant after the 19-year-old woman who had levelled the allegations refused to testify in the trial.

Suddenly the Pring-Wilson case leap-frogged to the front of CourtTV’s live trial docket.

Major networks followed CourtTV’s lead in covering the Pring-Wilson trial. CBS’ “The Early Show,” ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the syndicated investigative show “Inside Edition” all ran spots about the case.

“The national media swooped down as if this were a great town-gown cause celèbre,” says Brandeis University political scientist Jeffrey B. Abramson, a visiting professor in Harvard’s government department this year.

“But it was little attended to in the local media,” Abramson says. “The Boston Globe didn’t cover this on a daily basis.”

CourtTV’s decision to broadcast the trial live was—to some extent—a coincidence borne out of the Bryant case’s dismissal. But some legal experts say that the presence of cameras in the courtroom can have far-reaching effects on the conduct of high-profile cases.

The O.J. Simpson trial sparked widespread concerns that television cameras had wielded an undue influence on the Judge Lance Ito, who presided over the case, says Amherst College political scientist Austin D. Sarat, who is a visiting professor in Harvard’s Social Studies program this semester.

“Judges, with this awareness that there’s a public audience looking at them, may develop this sense of what dramatic performance requires,” says Sarat. “Will they look better if they keep a tight rein on lawyers? Will they look better if they give lawyers more latitude?”

The Simpson case “has very much colored people’s perceptions of cameras in the courtroom,” says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82. But Toobin, a former Crimson editorial board chair, says that in general courtroom cameras do not alter the proceedings. “People tend to forget that they’re there and tend to conduct themselves normally,” he says.

Television cameras have become “the equivalent of background noise” in high-profile cases, Abramson says.

“We’re mistrusting ourselves to think we just collapse before the cameras,” Abramson says. “We’re not that weak of will.”

Guthrie says that the CourtTV camera has had an “unobtrusive” role in the Pring-Wilson trial.

“In O.J., the cameras affected it because you had a judge who wasn’t strong and didn’t run a tight ship,” Guthrie says. But she says that Regina Quinlan, the judge in the Pring-Wilson trial, “doesn’t let media run roughshod over the proceedings.”

While Guthrie reports on the Pring-Wilson case from Cambridge, her colleagues in California are providing CourtTV with non-stop coverage of the Scott Peterson murder trial, even though cameras aren’t allowed to televise the proceedings.

In that case, Guthrie says, “instead of people being able to hear the evidence for themselves, they hear it filtered through reporters. And I don’t think that’s better.”

CHARGING UP

High-profile cases may sometimes encourage prosecutors “to play up charges,” Abramson says.

The Middlesex County district attorney’s office has garnered criticism for seeking a first-degree murder conviction against Pring-Wilson instead of lesser charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Abramson, a former Middlesex County assistant district attorney, says that Massachusetts law requires prosecutors to prove either “deliberate premeditation” or “extreme atrocity or cruelty” to warrant a first degree verdict.

“It’s certainly the case that in most street brawls, ‘murder one’ is not sought,” he says.

However, Abramson says the Middlesex prosecutors in the Pring-Wilson trial aren’t pursuing a “charging-up strategy,” but rather are following the letter of Massachusetts law.

“The wording of the statute says that the jury shall find the degree of murder,” Abramson says. “Prosecutors often rely on that to say they should just generally charge all the way up and leave the jury to sort out...first versus second degree.”

Meanwhile, Guthrie says CourtTV viewers are “really polarized” by the legal issues at play in the case, with some clamoring for Pring-Wilson to be locked up for life, and others calling for his immediate release.

If convicted of first-degree murder, Pring-Wilson would face life in prison without the possibility of parole.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.

Sidebar: In 1977, Trial Attracted More Local Buzz The Pring-Wilson case’s low local profile contrasts sharply with the buzz around Boston in the 1977 trial Commonwealth v. Soares, when a Harvard student was the victim—not the perpetrator—of a fatal stabbing.

That case stemmed from a fight in the “Combat Zone” neighborhood of downtown Boston, which led to the death of football player Andrew Puopolo ’77.

Puopolo’s teammates testified that the scuffle began when two prostitutes attempted to pick the football players’ pockets. Prosecutors argued that the three men attacked the Harvard students as part of a plan to help the prostitutes rob pedestrians. But defense lawyers contended that their clients were acting independently and rushed to protect the prostitutes from the footballers.

The trial stoked racial tensions in the city after three black men were convicted of first-degree murder in Puopolo’s death.

The case ultimately went to Massachusetts’ highest appellate court, which overturned the convictions because prosecutors had unconstitutionally excluded blacks from the trial jury.

In a second trial, a new jury found two of the three defendants not guilty, and convicted the third man on lesser charges of manslaughter.

“Some people feared that this [Pring-Wilson] case would provoke the same kind of—if not race—then class animosities” as the Soares trial, says visiting Professor of Government Jeffrey B. Abramson, a former Middlesex County assistant district attorney. But he says the Pring-Wilson trial has not yet elicited heated tensions in Cambridge.

CourtTV correspondent Savannah Guthrie says that the “clash between the classes” element of the Pring-Wilson trial attracted national media to the trial, “but I’m not sure that’s actually what the case is about.”

—DANIEL J. HEMEL