Mon Feb 10 2003
Five Washington Counties Begin Recording Child Interviews on Video
Investigative interviews of children in King, Kittitas, Stevens, Benton, and Franklin Counties have been routinely recorded on DVD since early January. Those are the counties participating in a Washington state pilot project to study video recording of such interviews.
The project requires all interviews of children younger than ten to be video recorded. The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office has decided to video all children younger than twelve, and some video sites elsewhere are video recording teenagers.
Although the pilot project requires the counties to use video only through 2003 (with results to be analyzed in 2004), the counties expect to keep the video equipment they have been provided. In King County, supervising prosecutor Lisa Johnson says her office plans to continue video recording indefinitely, unless experience or study shows good reason to stop.
The project chose DVD because it seems to be eclipsing video cassette recording generally and because the discs take much less storage space than video tapes. On the other hand, DVD material can more easily be distributed improperly, such as by Internet posting. King County will provide discs to defense attorneys in discovery, but only in exchange for an agreement not to pass them on without court approval and to return them when cases conclude.
Interviews are recorded by two cameras, one trained on the child and the other on the interviewer. The child’s image fills the screen except for an inset of the interviewer’s image.
Copyright © 2003 David S. Marshall
