Transcripts Aren't Enough

Surprisingly, in most U.S. jurisdictions, court proceedings, which can dramatically affect people‟s lives or property, are rarely recorded accurately or in their entirety because only a small percentage of courts regularly create a video record of court proceedings. Of those courts that do, most do not preserve the video record but simply turn it into a transcript.

Keith A. Gorgos, Comment, Lost in Transcription: Why the Video Record Is Actually Verbatim, 57 Buff. L. Rev. 1057, 1058 (2009)(footnotes omitted). The author analyzes ways that transcripts can be inadequate records of trials -- for instance because the text does not include all the non-verbal cues a witness can give or because the court reporter simply did not capture the speech accurage -- and argues that video records be kept and made the official.