Photo: Shutterstock

The electronic courtroom is here, whether litigants like it or not. The Riverside County Superior Court Appellate Division affirmed several lower court rulings that judges can oversee trials over traffic disputes via videoconferencing technology without a defendant's consent. 

The July decision comes in a consolidated appeal, in which the appellants were accused of various violations of the California Vehicle Code in seven separate trials. Appellants in each of the trials objected to the judge opting to oversee the cases via video conferencing rather than being physically present. 

In an opinion published Aug. 29, Judge Carlos Cabrera of the Superior Court of San Bernardino County acknowledges that trial courts have inherent power to “formulate rules of procedure” to ensure “orderly administration of justice.” However, he contends that even so, “courts must tread carefully when creating new procedures as appellate courts will not authorize new procedures of dubious constitutional validity.”

Yet video conferencing in traffic infraction cases has been addressed by California law as far back as 2013, with a Rule of Court allowing superior courts to conduct procedures by “two-way remote video communication.” However, Cabrera writes the rule, which was amended in 2015, “only addresses a situation when a defendant requests to appear via remote two-way video communication.” What's more, it confines such communications as in place of witnesses and defendants in the courtroom. And “that is not what occurred in these matters.”

“In all these cases both the defendant and all the witnesses were in one courtroom and the trial judge was located in another courtroom,” Cabrera writes, adding that the rule “only applies when the defendant requests to proceed according to this rule,” and thus the matter must be resolved “on constitutional grounds.”

It's on these constitutional grounds where defendants find their break. Cabrera notes that California statutory law stipulates an individual charged with an infraction has “some, not all, of the constitutional rights afforded a defendant in a misdemeanor criminal prosecution.”

And when it comes to “right to presence” in a trial over a traffic infraction, Cabrera said that because it's guaranteed by the state, California precedent sets a standard in which “reversal is only warranted for a miscarriage of justice” in the event that a more favorable option for the appealing party would have been reached otherwise.

In a dissent, Judge Khymberli Apaloo of the Superior Court of San Bernardino County wrote that the trial courts violated both the California Constitution and the traffic code, “a structural error” that “cannot be resolved applying harmless error.”

“The California Constitution provides defendants the right to be 'personally present,'” Apaloo wrote. “Although a defendant can always waive their rights, the practice of the trial court requiring defendants to submit to a trial via two-way remote video communication denies defendants their right to personal presence, absent a waiver.”

Read the opinion here: