Lyon County Rules In Favor Of Technology

by John Beresford
Various complexities are faced by the judges and attorneys in the new Lyon County Courthouse in Emporia, KS, where the courtrooms are newly equipped with technology to facilitate legal procedures and the presentation of evidence.

A/V consultant Theer & Associates designed the audio/video system for the courthouse, a project that included systems for six rooms—the five courtrooms on the third floor and the county commissioner’s chambers on the main level—as well as for surveillance and the media.

Over the course of two years, Theer & Associates created and refined a multi-purpose system that ultimately assists a jury in its interpretation of facts. Six 18-inch LCD monitors from NEC are set on the inside of the jury rail for every two people in the jury, with a high-compliance speaker from Renkus-Heinz mounted below each one. “Not only can the jurors have a direct view of what’s presented on the screen, but they can hear the audio in close proximity for maximum amount of intelligibility,” said Lonnie Theer, principal and owner of Theer & Associates. “They won’t have to wonder, ‘Well, I couldn’t quite make out what was said.’”

Each courtroom was equipped with a total of 24 speakers. Renkus-Heinz speakers were used twice more, with one for the court reporter and one for the bailiff. The other 16, from JBL, are installed in the ceiling and fire straight down, covering the judge’s bench, each attorney, the witness stand and the gallery, which is covered by 12 speakers.

To cut down on feedback potential, the speakers automatically mute above a person who is talking, according to Larry Heilman, president and owner of Smith Audio Visual in Topeka, KS, the contractor for the installation. To achieve the same end, Heilman installed GN30E microphones with CK31 cardioid cartridges from AKG.

The signal processing is all done through the Peavey MediaMatrix X-Frame, of which six were installed. It’s a digital processing and automatic mixing system that EQs separately for each mic input and each output, or amp channel.

The X-Frame, used also for signal transport in the courthouse, is easily reprogrammed whenever necessary, and an extra unit is located at the Theer offices in Omaha, NE, for troubleshooting. It also enables the use of equipment such as that for assistive listening from an infrared Sennheiser system installed in all the rooms.

In place of projectors, Heilman installed a total of three 50-inch plasma screens from Pioneer, located on the back wall to the left or right of the judge’s bench, depending on the courtroom.

Aside from the six NEC 18-inch LCD screens in the jury rail, another five were installed at the judge’s bench, attorney’s tables, witness stand, and podium, a separate swivel unit for attorney presentations.

Video and data are both fed over the video system, and every image presented on the monitors, whether it be VHS, DVD or computer, is scaled up to a 1024 x 768 resolution.

Instead of line doublers or quadruplers, Heilman installed a scaler/switcher from Inline, which takes the S-video and scales it up, line doubling or tripling it when necessary in order to get the required resolution. Through the use of Extron’s scan converter, anything put up through the system can be recorded digitally.

The AMX touchscreen, located at the judge’s bench, handles the control of the system, talking to the MediaMatrix, the Extron and the scaler/switcher. Theer designed the touchpanels so that they’d be easy to use after a couple of minutes of demonstration, accommodating the many visiting judges at the courthouse.

All the controls are on one screen, providing a tidy package of tools that give the judge greater control over courtroom proceedings. The judge can preview any material, select who sees it, and then make it available to the jury only when deemed appropriate.

When the judge pushes the sidebar button on the AMX touchscreen to enable confidential sidebar communication between counsel and the presiding judge, a pink-noise masking system comes through all the speakers in the courtroom, bringing instantaneous privacy without walls. At the same time, all the microphones are automatically muted—but the stenographer is still able to listen to the exchange through a pair of headphones and document it.

The capability to take digital photographs of physical evidence, using a document camera, saves time in court. Or, with the Pointmaker from Boeckeler, the monitors can take on the look of a sports telecast, as the judge, attorneys and witness can make annotations over video on the screen. “We’re also taking all that information, including the audio and video, the latter of which is converted to S-video, and recording all the court proceedings at the same time,” Theer explained.

With 25 cameras from Panasonic in and around the Lyon County Courthouse, the facility’s surveillance system records on to an 80-gigabyte hard drive, using a 16-channel digital recorder.

There is also a media camera in each courtroom, and the video is fed into a media room, which has four Marshall dual 6.4-inch color LCD monitors. There, reporters can watch, listen and record court proceedings. And should the judge desire to do so, the video can be fed to a broadcast truck for the local television networks.

All of the surveillance cameras terminate to the security office, located on the first floor of the courthouse. While users can typically only view one camera at a time with analog, this digital system can put up 16 cameras on the screen at a time; therefore, all the cameras in the courthouse can be shown on just two screens. Then, to zero in on a certain camera, the user can just click on it to make the image fill the screen.

Heilman and his staff—Ken Klamm, Daryl McLinn and Walt Bryant—also tied in 55 panic alarms, which, when activated, bring up a graphic on the security computer. If a camera is in the area where the alarm sounds, it swings around and focuses in.

All told, the Lyon County Courthouse installation took about eight months to complete. “When you’re running something like 120,000 feet of wire and making about 10,000 terminations, it’s going to take awhile,” Heilman said.

And it may take awhile to answer the burning question: Has the technology improved the flow of the administration of justice? “It’s still too early to tell,” McKenzie said.

John Beresford is a freelance writer living in New York, NY.

• Smith Audio Visual • www.smithav.com • 800.521.3936
• Theer & Associates • www.theer.com • 402.597.2818

Copyright© 2002 United Entertainment Media, a CMP Media Information Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.