Courtrooms are part community theater, part science fair and part debate club. I was 17 when I first stepped inside one. My father, a night janitor at the Marin County Civic Center, was showing me around the building one day and as we sat in on a hearing I was surprised by the room’s wood-paneled intimacy — it was nothing like the cavernous courtrooms of the movies. What really struck me was how the court’s lawyerly rituals were so mundane, yet the voyeuristic thrill of observing strangers in trouble was intoxicating. What also should’ve impressed me at the time was how easy it was to enter the Hall of Justice. About a month or so later a bloody shootout involving black militants erupted in one of the courtrooms and ended in four deaths. From that day, America’s casual, walk-in access to its courtrooms would never be the same.
If Frank Lloyd Wright’s airy, light-filled Marin County monument is one of the most hospitable gestures of modernism, then L.A.’s Clara Foltz criminal courts building must be one of its rudest. The façade’s dense brutalism is matched inside by Soviet-style workmanship and the fascist chaos of the building’s public spaces. Lines of visitors can stretch out the door to Temple Street and up to Broadway while those inside await in sweltering heat to pass through whichever two of the first floor’s three functioning security checkpoints happen to be operating. Jurors, lawyers and cops are all sardined into similarly stifling elevators that are infuriatingly slow to arrive, and a second security check awaits arrivees on the ninth floor, where the Spector trial is held in Department 106.
The courthouse’s air conditioning is generated a block away and its chilled air seems to be entirely concentrated in Department 106, where spectators shiver on wooden pews. During breaks we spill out in the crowded, windowless hallway to bad cell phone receptions or flooded bathrooms. There never seems to be enough oxygen, let alone privacy, to hold a conversation out of earshot of jurors or the defendants’ retinue of lawyers and bodyguards. This has its benefits, though.
Last Thursday during the afternoon break, I watched Spector’s young wife, Rachelle, corner Court TV reporter Beth Karas.
“Just so you know?” Rachelle informed the reporter. “Phil doesn’t wear a hairpiece.”
Clearly the Spector camp had been miffed by what it had been reading on Court TV’s Web site about his new ’do — which looks as though it could be the old wig that had accidentally gotten sent out with the dry cleaning and came back all ruffly.
“I do Phil’s hair every day,” Rachelle said.
“What is it then?” asked Karas.
“Hair!” said the wife of the accused, and the impromptu press conference was over.
