By Sara Soteras and Acosta |
Washington (EFE).- In the first row of the Supreme Court of the United States there is a seat reserved for the cartoonist Bill Hennessy. For 40 years, his pencil has portrayed cases such as the one that repealed federal protection of the right to abortion, the cause of 9/11 or the legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
It all started “by chance” when a television channel called the college where the young Hennessy was studying Fine Arts. “We need a cartoonist for a court.” He was the only volunteer. That impulse defined the course of his profession, leading him to witness up to three political trials of US presidents.
The truth is that the profession of court caricaturist has been dying for years and the latest twist in the script comes hand in hand with the entry of cameras into hearings, as more courts decide to start allowing them in their rooms.
Hennessy himself has portrayed sessions in which the request for entry of the cameras into the room was discussed: “I found that he was drawing the lawyer presenting the argument to basically throw me out,” the artist explains to EFE.
Indiana courts recently allowed cameras into courtrooms for the first time in May, after a pilot project last year. One of the requirements is not to directly record jurors, minors and some witnesses. Furthermore, access is decided on a case-by-case basis.
The profession of cartoonist and its slow death
John McGauley, the chief administrative officer of the Allen Superior Court, points out to EFE that “the courts are a mystery to the citizens. Seeing what’s going on in the room with their own eyes gives audiences one more tool to increase their faith in them.”
However, the official believes that the presence of cameras “can be harmful in some proceedings”, so “there will always be a demand for cartoonists”.
The artist Christine Cornell, who has spent 50 years attending courts to portray personalities such as former President Donald Trump or the controversial Republican congressman George Santos, whose drawing went viral on social networks a few weeks ago, is not so clear.
“We have been dying for 50 years,” Cornell tells EFE. For her, this profession is “anachronistic” and she feels like a “dinosaur”, although she firmly believes in the need for new generations of cartoonists to continue, especially in the face of the “threat” of the cameras.
In his opinion, “you cannot fight against a camera in terms of time, but you can in many other ways”, giving it more humanity than taking a simple photograph.
“We portray something that takes place over many minutes. If the hearing lasts an hour, you draw half a dozen people in their most relevant form. The cameras cannot create the dramatic dynamics between the characters because it only has one shot”, defends the artist.
The pressure of every detail
Like Cornell, Hennessy describes the intensity of each case, where no crucial detail can be missed.
The cartoonist recalls that in an appearance of the well-known “Washington DC snipers”, the judges asked one of the defendants to show how he used the weapon for the manhunt that took place in the capital in 2002.
Because that defendant moved too quickly, the cameras didn’t arrive in time, but Hennessy was able to replay the scene from memory, so the only graphic image that exists of that moment is his own.
The pressure increases when celebrities are the protagonists. “People know them and expect to recognize them,” says Hennesy, who admits that she sometimes has “the feeling that she didn’t draw them pretty enough” or didn’t do it perfectly.
Precisely this artist was criticized for his portrait of Trump during the reading of the charges against him this month in a Miami court for taking an image of him that was too “flattering”.
Media interest and the irruption of cameras
On the other hand, these types of cases are the ones that arouse the most expectation and in which the media have the most interest in entering.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have already demonstrated it with their trial open to the public and full of media, something that Hennessy classifies as “a good argument” to advocate against the entry of the cameras.
In fact, it was because of a case with a similar expectation in 1935 that cameras were banned in court. The so-called “trial of the century” on the kidnapping-murder of the 20-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who was then the most admired man in the United States.
It was described as “the largest concentration of men and equipment for news coverage since the Great War”, in reference to World War I (1914-1918), it brought together more than 100 audiovisual reporters, 50 cameras and 35 sound trucks.
If Cornell is clear about one thing, it is that the US Supreme Court will not give in to turning its courtroom into a “circus fanfare” using cameras. “Broadcast television tends to make lawyers and judges bombastic because they are addressing a larger audience, which is not an appropriate use of the system,” Cornell believes.
And it is that, with the entrance of the cameras to the rooms, there are times that the magic of a mouse sneaking through the corridors is lost, like the one that Hennessy photographed with its colored pencils during the impeachment trial in the Senate of then-President Bill Clinton.