Videoconference in French Courtrooms: Its consequences on judicial settings

International audience<p>The use of videoconference has increased considerably in French courtrooms in order to minimize the costs of extracting defendants from prisons to attend various types of judicial hearings. It is often understood by its promoters in such settings as ‘transparent’ (when it works) on the basis of a dyadic model of communication, in which judicial proceedings would involve one speaker and one listener most of the time. However, ‘multi-party’ situations in which three participants or more are simultaneously relevant visually often occur during courtroom proceedings. This makes salient specific concerns regarding the production of relevant video frames on a moment-by-moment basis. Based on a video recorded corpus of pre-trial hearings involving remote participants connected through a video link, this paper examines the practical and multimodal work required to produce proper mediated frames as the judicial hearing unfolds. The main objective of our approach is to uncover the practical and social consequences of a videoconference system on the organization of the court hearings.