On February 6, 1995, Judge Lance Ito approved the Boeckeler Pointmaker video marker for use in his courtroom during the nationally televised O.J. Simpson trial. The product was requested by attorneys when they found that they needed an easy way to focus judge and jury attention on video evidence. This evidence was displayed simultaneously on four monitors, one video projector -- and, with Judge Ito's approval -- to the news media for television broadcast.
"In this trial, video evidence was generated in a variety of ways," says Boeckeler President Pat Brey, who helped with the installation. "It could be presented as a videotape of the crime scene replayed by a VCR; as documents, photographs, sketches and maps captured by a document camera; or as other images retrieved from a laser disk player or computer. Because of the extensive use of video and multimedia in this trial, there's a need for a video marker."
Using colorful drawing lines and pointers generated by the Pointmaker, attorneys drew and pointed on the video image being discussed. "While the concept itself is not new, Boeckeler recently made the technology simple and inexpensive enough to use in smaller presentation arenas, including classrooms, distance learning centers and boardrooms," Brey says. "The legal community has just caught on to it."
"We never expected to leap right into a nationally-televised trial," Brey admits. "We had just placed a Pointmaker in a showcase installation here in Tucson -- the Courtroom of the Future at the University of Arizona Law School -- in hopes of helping Professor Winton Woods educate future attorneys about the technology available to them. It's great to see that today's attorneys are interested."
Indeed, since that trial, the Pointmaker video marker has been installed in many federal, state and educational courtrooms and across the country, including The Courtroom 21 Project installed at the William &Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va., in 1993 in cooperation with the National Center for State Courts. Now known as The Center for Legal and Court Technology, the courtroom is heavily involved in judicial and lawyer educational training, as well as providing courtroom designs and needs assessments.
Other courtrooms you can find the Pointmaker on hand are the 9th Judicial Court of Florida; the U.S. District Court, Central District of California in Los Angeles; the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York; the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. among many others all across the U.S.
With the wide variety of visual evidence being presented these days in court via digital media, Larry Heilman, president and key designer of Smith Audio Visual says the heart of a digital courtroom systems he’s worked on include the Pointmaker. In 2011, he began integrating the Pointmaker CPN-5000 model that had recently been upgraded to be compliant with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protected (HDCP) video. This model also features a capture, print and TCP/IP networking, and is a highly flexible scaler, capable of receiving video input in composite, Y/C, VGA, DVI-I and HDMI formats. The Pointmaker CPN-5000 also scales the output in high-resolution formats up to 1280 x 1024, 1440 x 900 and 1080p.
“That’s why we got the Pointmaker,” Heilman says. “It allows us to annotate from all four of the 22-inch touchscreens. This is something that no other annotation unit will allow. The outputs and control from the CPN-5000 make distribution simple.”
In addition, “it just took a few minutes to figure out how to use Pointmaker,” says Osage County Attorney Brandon L. Jones. “It was extremely easy. I just used my finger on the screen. It really helped witnesses be able to draw the jury’s attention to specific areas of the exhibits in my recent capital murder case.”
