What’s The Point Of Shorthand?

Have you ever wondered how we get to hear what’s happened inside court rooms? With hours and days and weeks of evidence, it’s hard to work out how all that information can get whittled down to three paragraphs on a news website or a short piece on the 1800 news bulletin. It’s especially difficult because, by law, you can’t record what is actually said in court other than by writing it down - or, at the very most, typing it out.

It’s decades since I wrote my first court report. You’d think I’d have got used to it by now but the whole process is one (very) long panic attack and it never gets any better. I’m always scared of missing a vital fact out of a report because I didn’t take it down properly.

The rules are arcane and were designed for a world without smartphones or computers that can cope with live transcription.

SHORTHAND

The law about what can be done inside a courtroom are very strict. Rightly so. For example, the artists who draw sketches of the action in court are not allowed to actually draw in there - they can only look very carefully, write notes down and then make their sketches sitting outside afterwards. It’s only in the last few years that taking a laptop computer into court to type things out has been allowed and that’s why, in the old days, most reporters learnt how to write in shorthand - otherwise known as the language of the smug. I never learnt how to read it nor write it but deep in my soul I loathed it and every self-satisfied reporter who could write it. God, they drove me mad with their swoops and scribbles.

Latin in an age of emojis.

Old-school hacks are reading this now, sitting at home with a cup of cocoa, bristling with anger, but they’re sitting at home with a cup of cocoa partly because the world has moved on and those skills aren’t needed anymore. However, in the glory days of shorthand, those who could write it were supreme.

Shorthand is a set of symbols that take the place of full words making it much faster to write down. It’s particularly useful in court reporting where every single word can be vitally important. It’s been around for years. Lots of years. It might even go back as far as the Greek historian Xenophon who used a version of it to write down the thoughts of Socrates. In more recent times, you’d always see the court reporters scribbling their strange ticks, squiggles and shapes, capturing every word said by the prosecution, the defence, the clerk of the court and the judges or magistrates. I preferred to listen to what was being said and watch the reactions of those involved. I was lucky, I only had to write a few paragraphs of online copy and record a radio voice piece. Newspaper and website journalists had to write things up in a lot more detail. But short is often sweet: sometimes the more you write, the more you obfuscate and occasionally, just occasionally, writing out a verbatim account of the day’s events in court four had a tendency to be mind-numbing boring.

He said this, she said that, the judge said something else.

Half a dozen hacks frantically scrawling away on their curly-metal-topped notepads at 120wpm (words per minute), fretting they’d missed something when someone coughed. At every break, they’d huddle together comparing notes to make sure they hadn’t misheard or miswritten something. This meant they all had the same record of what had been said.. which was important. But boring. Meanwhile the telly types and the radio lot would sit back, twiddling their thumbs until someone said something vaguely interesting. Then they’d jot it down on the back of a fag packet and wander outside to record twenty seconds to camera.

You can see why the scribblers hated us, can’t you?

VERDICTS IMMINENT

For reporters who usually spend most of their time trudging through muddy fields or getting drenched interviewing punters in high streets up and down the land, the prospect of a few weeks covering a major trial is attractive. Coffee, set lunchtimes, an early finish on Fridays - what’s not to like?

But there is a time, in every trial, when the manure approaches the fan and there’s no way to avoid it.

Every trial comes to a conclusion and most of the time, that involves a verdict: Guilty or Not Guilty (in England, Wales and Northern Ireland). But that moment, when a voice comes over the loudspeaker saying “Will all parties in the case of X (not the social media company!) return to court 4” always seems to come as a complete and utter surprise to everyone involved. There’s no logic in this - we all know a trial is going to end but for some reason, even if the gaggle of reporters have been listening to every bit of evidence and have spent the last six days waiting for the jury to come back and announce its decision, it still seems to come out of nowhere.

“The jury’s coming back.”

“No! I’m not ready!”

As the 24 hour news channels proliferated in the 1990s, so did the need to be first with the result of a court case. Big hearings meant lots of reporters and that meant lots of competition to be the first to get the news to air. Suddenly whole teams of people were needed to cover the end of a trial. There’d be camera operators, broadcast truck engineers, a producer or two standing by to grab the relatives of both the person on trial or the victims. You’d also have someone staying in court catching reaction and the thoughts of the judge after they passed down the sentences but the best job of all was mine: being the ‘verdict breaker’, giving the big reveal,

“Guilty”

or

“Not Guilty”

If you think about it, the whole shebang was ludicrous. Nobody, apart from a few people with over-tight sphincter muscles, worries about who was first with a verdict. There really aren’t scores of people glued to a bank of television screens screaming,

“Wow! Sky News is fantastic! They were six seconds faster to that verdict than the BBC was!”

The desperation to be first was hammered home by managers who thought their managers would be impressed by it. Reporters, desperate to ingratiate themselves with middle managers would tussle and scrap to sit as near to the court doors as possible so they could run out as soon as the first syllable of “n” for not guilty or “g” for guilty could be heard. It was madness and the whole system came a cropper at a trial I was covering in Leeds. As often happens, the jury hadn’t made decisions about ALL the verdicts, just some of them. They came back into court and explained to the judge that they had reached some verdicts. The judge decided to hear what they were and, as they were read to the court, a group of reporters legged it for the exit. On this trial I wasn’t the verdict breaker - I was there to listen to what the judge said afterwards but as the courtroom door swung shut as the journalists raced off down the corridor, they missed the judge tell the court that these verdicts couldn’t be reported on until the jury had finished with the others.

I put my hand up. Everyone looked at me, which is quite unnerving, I have to say.

“Yes?” said the judge.

I shuffled to my feet. Talking to a judge is always a little bit scary - like talking to the head teacher in your first week in the Infants.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit late, Your Honour. It’s already on air now.”

The judge seemed completely confused - totally unaware that radio and TV were live, that news channels existed, mobile phones had been invented and that society had moved on from a daily report in The Times of London. I explained that the cameras and microphones were already live and the BBC, ITN and Sky were already broadcasting the partial verdicts.

“Oh.. I see,” he said. “Well, you might as well get on with it then, I suppose.”

The rest of us made a bee-line for the door, facing the judge the whole while like unruly but subordinate courtiers, bowing and scraping as we went.

Getting out of the actual court was always a problem - especially with big buildings. You’d often see reporters from different news organisations running in opposite directions as they tried to find a way out. I once followed someone into the ladies loos at Preston Crown Court thinking it was the exit.

Ideas to improve the way we broke verdicts were tossed around. We played with the notion of sending text messages from inside the court to the outside world but there were so many problems. Firstly, back then, it was against the law to have a mobile phone that was turned on inside a court. Sod’s Law dictated that at the time you really needed it to turn on quickly it would take half a day to start up. Secondly, depending on the signal strength inside a big concrete building, the text message could be delayed and as you were driving home at the end of the day your phone would ping and messages would say

“VERDICT. NOT GUILTY GBH.”

Followed a few minutes later by:

“SORRY, THAT SHOULD BE GUILTY GBH.”

“I THINK.”

In the days before smartphones there was another issue too - that you had to input the text by tapping on the numerical keypad half a million times in order to send even the simplest message. To text the message “Guilty. All charges” would involve you typing the following:

“4/88/444/555/8/999 0 2/555/555 0 222/44/2/777/4/33/7777”

Anyone under 40 is shaking their head as they read this.

There had to be an easier way and, so a variety of ideas were kicked around.

The first solution, at a massive murder trial involved table tennis bats.

“Go through it again.”

“If I hold up a table tennis bat with a red side towards the window it means they’ve been found guilty. If it’s green, it means they’ve been cleared.”

“But what if the jury can’t come to a decision?”

“Shut up.”

As a system, it worked brilliantly, until someone realised the reflections outside meant you couldn’t see the bats, never mind work out what colour they were. The idea was ditched.

These days, reporters are allowed phones and laptops in court as long as they use them only to send verdicts out by text message or WhatsApp although nowadays, a TV reporter doesn’t even need to go into court. They stand outside in front of the camera with an earpiece in and another team member is in court listening to what’s going on. A text message is sent to the reporter’s phone.

“Jury back in. Verdicts imminent. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”

The reporter will promptly evacuate their bowels - or at least want to. They scream down the microphone for the studio presenter to cross to the court room where the verdict is about to be delivered. Sometimes the gallery does exactly that - which can result in a nightmare where the reporter has to fill dead air for five minutes until the jury’s actually done its job and delivered its verdict. Often, however, the opposite is true: the reporter screams for the presenter to introduce the story and cross to them standing outside court only to hear the words,

“But before anything else, Alex has got an extended look at this weekend’s weather..”

Out of the corner of your eye as you wait for Alex to stop wittering on about the Northern Lights, you can see the reporter from Sky News on the other side of the concourse straightening their clothes, smiling happily, sipping from a non-fat macchiato before they casually start talking about the case. Meanwhile, you’re screaming down the line for the weather presenter to stop telling me it’s raining in Manchester (it’s always raining in Manchester - you don’t need a weather presenter to tell you that). Then, as you’re waving down the line, trying to attract the attention of anyone in the TV gallery to tell you what’s happening, you hear the presenter say your name and you have to smile, look calm and remember everything that was said in a six week long trial.

I was outside court, a colleague was inside taking notes and was ready to text me the result of a massive murder trial. Like clockwork, the studio crossed to me.

“Nick Garnett’s outside court where the verdict is imminent.”

I introduced the case and explained the jury was about to deliver its verdicts.

Ping

I clicked on the text message and looked down

“DAD, WHO’S PICKING ME UP FROM SCHOOL TODAY???” Always capital letters.

Luckily the phone pinged again.

“GUILTY. ALL CHARGES. COMING OUT IN 2 MINUTES.”

I read out the correct text message, relayed the verdicts and went into a carefully prepared background of what the case had been about. I’d learnt it almost word for word and I’d cunningly written it in such a way that I could recite it if the man on trial had been found guilty or not guilty. Things were going well. I looked up to see Mark, the reporter in court, skipping down the steps and running over to me. He passed me his notebook.

“Well, I can tell you more now about what’s actually happened in court in the last couple of minutes.”

I looked down, ready to read what had gone on and that was the moment that I wished I’d learnt how to read shorthand. The page was full of scrawls and scribbles. It looked like a rat had dipped its toes in ink and then tapdanced all over the page.

Quick as a flash, I turned to Mark and pulled it out of the bag.

“So… what happened?”

I stuck the microphone under his nose.

It would have worked beautifully if the court room hadn’t been on the second floor of the building two hundred metres from the main door, if he hadn’t run as fast as he could and if he’d done more cardio exercise in the last three years.

He wheezed, he coughed, he spluttered. He made no sense at all and I vowed to buy myself An Idiot’s Guide To Shorthand the next day.

THE CROSSBOW CANNIBAL

Expenses Claim:

Item purchased: Time with a sex worker.

Cost: £40.

I really should explain…

News organisations often want to tell the background to a trial and that involves interviewing lots of people who have something to do with the events in question. Sometimes that can be complicated.

Bradford is a city built on the textile industry. The former mills and warehouses fan out around the city centre . They’re magnificent to see but are now in desperate search of a purpose in life. Instead of demolishing them, they’re often converted into housing.

One Monday morning a security guard was checking the CCTV footage from the weekend. What he saw led to the police arriving in huge numbers a few minutes later. Within the hour, a man was under arrest. Even before he’d been questioned there were police officers appearing on television and radio telling the people of Bradford they didn’t need to worry, everything was under control and they weren’t looking for anyone else as part of the investigation. This is police code for “Relax, folks. We’ve got him bang to rights.”

The man, PhD student, Stephen Griffiths, became known as The Crossbow Cannibal - mainly because that’s what he called himself when he appeared in court. As The Daily Mail reported it at the time:

This morning Griffiths, 40, appeared at Bradford Magistrates’ Court where, when asked to confirm his name, he said: ‘The crossbow cannibal’.

Asked for his address, Griffiths, who was wearing a black shirt and navy blue jeans, replied: ‘Erm ... here I guess’.

He didn’t drive a car so preyed on people living or working locally. Round the corner and up a short hill was Bradford’s red light district. Those working in the city’s sex industry had been targeted and now, quite understandably, they wanted more protection. I was sent to get an interview for the “backgrounder” and here I was interviewing someone while a man stood over the road with a knife as long as my forearm in case I tried any funny business.

I’d had a chat with a senior police officer in Bradford who told me what I should do to ensure nobody broke the law but he warned me it could be a bit dangerous.

I parked up and sat with my hands on the steering wheel in full view of anyone walking past. It was only a couple of minutes until someone knocked on the passenger side window. The police officer had told me how this would and should play out. The girl, who was probably in her early twenties but looked older was bent over, looking through the window. She raised her eyebrows (“If she doesn’t make an offer she’s unlikely to be successfully prosecuted”). I got out of the car and put my hands on the roof so she could see them.

“I just want to talk..” This was not a conversation I ever thought I’d be having. It was tense. I explained how I was a journalist, how I just wanted to interview her and what it was about. I said I was willing to compensate her for her time not working. She told me to wait and she ran over the road behind me and started talking to someone I couldn’t see. Returning, she told me a price and £40 was handed over. I wasn’t going to start haggling.

“I’m Patrice,” she said, smiling.

I told her my name was Nick. I’m pretty sure only one of us was telling the truth.

I started the interview and she talked at length about how worried she and her friends had been. They’d known people had been disappearing, they knew something was going on but nobody was taking them seriously. I asked how scared she was about being attacked.

“Not much, to be honest,” she said. “I always carry protection.”

She wasn’t referring to condoms and she wasn’t kidding. She pointed over at the doorway opposite.

“My man’s never far away.”

Out of the shadows a tall shape appeared. Patrice asked me to wind down the window and she shouted over,

“Show him what you’ve got.”

I wondered where the evening was heading until he opened the palm of his hand and from the sleeve of his jacket a knife slid into view. If it had happened in a Hollywood film it would have looked incredibly cool. This wasn’t a Hollywood film. I gulped.

“And I’ve got my own blade too,” she told me as I looked down at her hand where she was now holding a short knife with a fixed blade. “A girl’s got to be careful,” she smiled.

We talked for about twenty minutes and then Patrice got out, walked over the road, slipped the man the money and went back to work. “Oops,” I thought. There was something else I needed and I ran after her (not the wisest thing to do when there’s a guy with a great big knife not far away).

“Patrice, I just need one other thing,” I said. “Can you sign my receipt book to say you got the money?”

And that’s what led to the most unusual expenses claim I ever made.

Payment type: “cash”

Payment amount: “£40”

Was a receipt obtained: “yes”

Is it a VAT receipt: “…no”

Who provided the goods or the service: “Patrice”

Where will the goods be kept after use: “er….”