Law students at Howard University have joined the fight to make public remote access to court proceedings permanent in Maryland courts after sitting in on Prince George’s County bail review hearings where they said they witnessed judges violate the rights of defendants.
Their findings were published to Howard’s website and distributed to lawmakers in the Maryland General Assembly on the same day that the state Senate’s judicial proceedings committee effectively killed a court transparency bill that would have mandated all Maryland courtrooms give the public virtual access to most court proceedings. The student report advocated for the law as part of a general call for judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys to embrace transparency and hold themselves accountable.
“Ensuring fully functioning public remote access to court proceedings has the potential to set the example for what courts across the US and around the world should do in order to … embody fairness and equity,” the students wrote.
A spokesperson for the Maryland judiciary said that judicial leaders “take these claims seriously” but that they couldn’t comment substantively on the report because they were still reviewing it. The judiciary remains opposed to the remote-access bill, the spokesperson said.
Court transparency advocates, led by the volunteer organization Courtwatch PG, have spent the past two legislative sessions lobbying lawmakers in Annapolis to pass the law. Grammy-winning musician Fiona Apple, who is a Courtwatch PG volunteer and observes hearings virtually from California, has been one of the bill’s most high-profile supporters. She has posted videos to social media about her experiences as a volunteer, wrote an original score for a short documentary about courtwatching and advocated for the legislation in numerous interviews, including one with Washington Post Live last month.
The proposed bill died in committee last year, and it seems destined for a similar fate this session — despite widespread support from a long list of reputable state and national civil rights organizations, the Prince George’s County Council and the Maryland Public Defenders Office. After lawmakers heard oral testimony on the bill earlier this year — including opposition from judges and prosecutors — advocates worked with the bill sponsors to propose revisions that addressed concerns about cost and the safety of witnesses and victims.
Those amendments were filed with the committees, but the bill did not get another serious look from either chamber.
On Thursday, advocates sent the Howard report directly to lawmakers. Hours later, the Senate’s judicial proceedings committee voted down the bill.
“Fiona Apple, don’t be mad at me, all right?” state Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) said as he called the vote, pausing to laugh. “Oh, that’s a call to arms right there, shouldn’t have said that on mic. Whoops.”
“This wasn’t a joking matter,” Carmen Johnson, the director of Courtwatch PG, said later. The Howard report, she said, underscored the “many challenges” that community members are facing in Maryland, which has some of the highest incarceration rates in the country.
“Public officials aren’t taking even a moment to consider this legislation, even after we considered all the opposition and made amendment after amendment,” Johnson said. “All we got was laughed at.”
Smith, the committee chair, said in an interview that his comment was made in jest and didn’t encompass the full context of his work advocating for transparency in the criminal justice system and for police accountability. The bill was not considered, he said, because of remaining concerns about how the law could impact court proceedings.
The Howard report came from the law school’s Movement Lawyering Clinic, which teaches students to combine their knowledge of the law with issue-focused community organizing and advocacy. In the past, the clinic focused on bail reform, but this time, it chose to scrutinize court transparency and judicial accountability — a timely topic as public officials have been weighing whether virtual court access launched during the pandemic should be extended.
Previously, including during testimony before lawmakers, Maryland judges have vocalized their concerns with the court transparency bill, citing budgetary burdens and worries that such a mandate could interfere with the integrity of court proceedings. The judiciary also has pushed back on allegations that it was violating people’s rights during bail review hearings.
The House judiciary committee has not yet voted on the legislation. Transparency advocates said their work pushing for greater remote access does not hinge on the legislation alone. If it fails this year, they’ll try again next year, they said, and will continue to advocate directly to the judiciary.
“This particular campaign is one that can help people in the short term and change the system in the long term,” said Justin Hansford, who teaches the clinic and serves as executive director of Howard’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. “There is reward for the community to have access to what’s actually happening in the courts that we pay for with our tax dollars, and what we want to do is ensure there is fairness and justice there under the constitution.”
Prince George’s County, which borders D.C., has been at the forefront of the national conversation around courtroom transparency.
Since the onset of the pandemic, Prince George’s courts have provided the public with virtual access to bail review hearings, first through Zoom and then audio only. That access led to a rapid expansion of Courtwatch PG, an organization that trains volunteers to observe bail review hearings, collect data on the results, and write accountability letters to prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, elected officials and the jail. Courtwatch PG, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Life After Release, now boasts the largest virtual courtwatching program and helped launch a formal national network with other volunteers in Los Angeles, New Orleans and Baltimore.
Since 2020, the work of those Courtwatch PG observers inspired the legislative fight in Annapolis for permanent remote access and has informed two federal lawsuits alleging civil rights violations at the county jail and in the courthouse. Courtwatch PG has also collaborated with law schools throughout the region, including Howard’s Movement Lawyering Clinic — giving law students the opportunity to directly witness the court system they one day hope to join.
Johnson trained the current clinic cohort from Howard and, alongside Hansford, helped guide the students through the drafting of their report. Hansford said the students went into the observation exercise “pure-hearted” and with the expectation that justice would be done. But what they witnessed left them feeling disheartened.
“They were affected by the things they saw and the things that they read and the things that they heard,” Johnson said.
In the report, the students cited nine cases in late 2022 and early 2023 in which they say they observed commissioners and judges in Prince George’s County setting unaffordable bonds, which they say violates the Maryland rule that dictates what the court should weigh when deciding to detain someone while they await trial.
The Howard report outlined several instances in which the students say judges improperly referred defendants to the county’s Office of Pretrial Services, which is the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Maryland that alleges that the county and the courthouse’s pretrial system is unconstitutional.
The students also wrote in the report that the quality of the remote courtroom audio, and the bench’s decorum around it, was very poor during their observations. The court in Prince George’s generally does not physically transfer jailed people into the court for their initial bail hearings and instead has an audio-video feed that connects the jail to the courtroom. The report claims that on at least three occasions, the audio quality was so bad that the defendant was unable to hear what was happening in the courtroom — a violation of their rights.
The Howard report also scrutinized the court’s practices surrounding mental health, as well as the medical needs of those being held at the county jail, which also was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2020 that ended in a settlement.
The Maryland judiciary spokesperson said it would take time for the court to review and verify the allegations, in part because specific case numbers and dates were not listed alongside the observations. The judiciary also said Zoom video access was “intended for participation only by the attorneys, parties, and those wishing to address the court and was limited to times when court proceedings were remote due to COVID-19.” In addressing claims that the court ignores medical concerns, the judiciary said the jail has a medical unit “and judges ask if counsel have inquired of [the Department of Corrections] whether a defendant’s needs cannot be addressed by the medical staff.”
The report did not name individual judges or attorneys in the report because, Hansford said, “this is about the system and not about individual bad apples.”
“Systemic problems call for systemic intervention and systemic changes,” he said.
There are some judges, Johnson said, who uphold the values that her Courtwatch PG organization pushes for. Others, she said, set a bad example for the students looking up to them.
“When I met with the students, what I heard was the pain and disappointment that our young future attorneys, future judges, future elected officials witnessed for themselves without me saying anything,” Johnson said. “And also, I saw the disappointment in their eyes knowing a lot of the judges look like us, and that’s a painful reality.”
Prince George’s is a majority-Black county, with a Black chief judge and a deep bench of Black judges, a Black state’s attorney, a Black police chief and a Black county executive. Many of the people cycling through the courts are also Black.
Those demographic data points were top of mind for the students, Hansford said, who were learning from him in the clinic that representation does not always equal justice.
“At Howard, we support Black excellence, but it’s not enough just to have our seats filled with people with diverse faces if you’re not going to actually take a different approach,” Hansford said. “That’s something we have to think about with all our institutions where we have Black faces in high places.”
This story has been updated with additional comments from Sen. William C. Smith Jr. and more context about the proposed legislation.