No doubt there’s a legal thriller about nearly every participant in the courtroom. Lots of noirish books about dogged prosecutors, dashing defense attorneys, a judge with home-life issues. Clint Eastwood just made Juror #2 about a juror who might have actually done the crime.
But as far as I know, there’s no thriller about the sketch artist. The old profession, always dying but never dead, has few remaining professionals: Christine Cornell, who drew me once, is still at it. D.C.’s Bill Hennessey, who frequently drew the Supreme Court of the United States, died last year. The wonderfully named Art Lien is still at it after 50 years. L.A.’s Bill Robles is almost alone using water colors, joined by the mononymic French painter Zziigg.
And then there’s Jane Rosenberg. The New York artist went to an arraignment without any sell-on deal in 1980. NBC bought her image, and she began her now 40 years in court art. In her new book Drawn Testimony, she recounts quite a few trials where she sketched from a corner. John Gotti asked her to avoid giving him a second chin. Ghislaine Maxwell turned around and turned the tables, sketching Rosenberg sketching Maxwell. Bill Cosby, Sam Bankman-Fried, even Tom Brady’s deflategate hearing helped fill her sketchbook.
Drawn Testimony has both a center glossy section with Rosenberg’s drawings, but also black-and-white reproductions on text pages. This is valuable when she makes a particular point about how, say, Harvey Weinstein looked at trial.
The job is both challenging and an opportunity for news readers. The artist gets up at dawn to get an ideal seat, sitting through often dull hearings waiting for the witness some editor wants an image of. The artist has to work silently, usually with acrylic pencils that noiselessly scrape across paper. They bring a huge kit of material. The profession is in decline because every state now allows photography in courts.
But the opportunity! A sketcher can pull off what Albert Camus called "the lie that tells a truth." There is no spot in a courtroom where the audience can see the front of a lawyer, the witness, the judge, and the jury all at once. But an artist can slide the personnel together, or merge different moments. Perhaps the judge didn’t form that expression at the exact moment the witness told her tale. But a sketch showing that combination might convey the judge’s reaction to the testimony.
The body language—the smirk, the accusatory pointed finger, and defendant on the stand, palms out in denial—make for the dramatic pictures still purchased by television networks and newspapers. New York Times artist Marilyn Church in New York family court in 1993 caught Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, two lawyers, a witness, and the judge, conveying every participant’s countenance at once, shrinking the courtroom into a square. Another artist might choose to show the vastness of a courtroom, making the participants overwhelmed in the architecture.
Federal courts still exclude photography, as do state courts on a case-by-case basis. When a California judge banned cameras from Michael Jackson’s case, Robles capped off a lengthy career that started with the Charles Manson and Patty Hearst trials.
No cameras are allowed in execution chambers, but sketch artists can portray that final event in a criminal proceeding. Trial jurors also remain unphotographable, but the sketch artist can anonymize the jury while showing viewers something a camera can’t.
Even where cameras are permitted, the sketch artist can pull off images unavailable to the shutterbug. Art Lien sketched a Trump impeachment trial. The Senate controls the cameras, so Lien captured a senator falling asleep off camera, and celebrity visitors up in the gallery.
The profession goes back at least to Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose line drawings and paintings grace the walls of lawyers worldwide. The courts that later banned photographers once banned artists. Sketch artists in some eras had to draw from memory outside the court.
World War II artist Howard Brodie returned home to the courtroom sketch job, drawing Jack Ruby and Manson. In those days, an entire bench in the front row might be devoted to artists. NFL player and actor Terry Crews started out as a courtroom artist in Flint, Michigan. (During tough times during his football career he sold illustrations to his teammates.)
Rosenburg’s book, like her life, is New York-focused. Readers get a tour through 40 years of Manhattan trials. Mafiosos, the Blind Sheikh, the Central Park Five, Martha Stewart, and Donald Trump all appear with fleshed-out but brief accounts of their trials and verdicts.
The book is part memoir, part history of recent New York trials, and part an explanation of a fascinating, still-living form of art.
Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist
by Jane Rosenberg
Hanover Square, 256 pp., $30
Robert Little is a criminal trial lawyer and writer in California