What the violin was to Jascha Heifetz, the television camera is to Donald Trump. The former president, however, could be without his most effective instrument — at his own team’s request — at his moment of greatest legal peril. Will America believe in his conviction if there is no camera to cover it?

Mr. Trump’s legal team has taken the position that cameras would do more harm than good. CNN reports that they wrote a letter to the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, arguing that the request for access should be denied because it would “create a circus-like atmosphere at the arraignment, raise unique security concerns, and is inconsistent with President Trump’s presumption of innocence.” The press supports such access.  

New York trails only Washington, D.C., in being unfriendly to media coverage within the courtroom. As the Fund for Modern Courts puts it, “New York is the media capital of the world, but it is one of the few United States jurisdictions that prohibits the use of cameras in most courtrooms.” Individual judges are granted degrees of discretion in drawing the bounds of press coverage.  

In Estes v. Texas, from 1965, the Supreme Court tossed out a conviction based on the presence of the press in the courtroom, which a 5-to-4 majority ruled impaired due process. In concurrence, Justice John Harlan II mused that the “day may come when television will have become so commonplace an affair in the daily life of the average person as to dissipate all reasonable likelihood that its use in courtrooms may disparage the judicial process.” 

That day came less than 20 years later, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that cameras in courtrooms were kosher in 1981, in Chandler v. Florida. In the words of Chief Justice Burger, “an absolute constitutional ban on broadcast coverage of trials cannot be justified.” The Committee on Freedom of the Press celebrated it as “an enormous legal advance for broadcasting.”  

The Fund for Modern Courts, which pushes for transparency in the Empire State’s judiciary, notes that “New York first banned electronic media coverage in the 1930s, and almost a century later, little has changed; by and large, members of the public wishing to see and hear proceedings in New York trial courts still must attend in person.”

A period of relative glasnost prevailed in New York courtrooms in the decade between 1987 and 1997, when a new law allowed for expanded electronic coverage, but that dispensation was allowed to expire by the assembly speaker at the time, Sheldon Silver, who had his own experience before the criminal bench. 

New York judges became camera shy after the media frenzy that attended the trial in 1935 of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and killing of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month old son, Charles Lindbergh Jr. It prompted a frenzy of press attention directed at the courthouse at Flemington, New Jersey, where the trial was held.  

A professor of American studies, Tom Doherty, who wrote a book titled “Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century,” relates that “every journalist, every novelist, anybody with any sort of journalistic ambition or back story” covered the case. “So you’ve got the best journalistic talent ever assembled covering it. The crime of the century gives way to the trial of the century.”

New York was flush with daily newspapers in 1935, the year of the trial, and newsreels were just  beginning to take off, ensuring that the widespread public interest in the trial had fresh means by which to be fed. Hauptmann was convicted, but so was the press; the exposure, bright lights, and instant communication were too much for jurists accustomed to courtrooms as sanctums.

Two years later, the American Bar Association wrote that photography and radio broadcasting at trial “degrade the court and create misconceptions” and pushed for them to be banned. The association pushed for television to be outlawed in 1952. 

That same year, New York passed section 52 of the New York Civil Rights Law, which ordained, “No person, firm, association or corporation shall televise, broadcast, take motion pictures or arrange for the televising, broadcasting, or taking of motion pictures” during trial.

That ban held until the period of experimental openness to recording between 1987 and 1997. A commission to assess it led by the dean of Fordham Law School, John Feerick, determined that the “benefits that flow from televised coverage of the judicial process are so important that they ought not to be sacrificed by barring cameras from the courtroom across-the-board.”

The commission recommended that “cameras should be permitted in New York State courts on a permanent basis,” but that has not happened, even as the trend has been otherwise nationwide. Forty-eight other jurisdictions depart from New York in allowing audio-visual coverage of both trial court and appellate procedures.

There are, though, efforts afoot to turn on the cameras. The chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law, Dan Novack, said in a statement, “Public access is the bedrock of our justice system — but its promise is hollow if constrained by geographic proximity, workday availability and space constraints. Without cameras, the vast majority of the public is effectively denied access.”