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| Coweta County Justice Center convenes with AV technology |
| by Kirsten Nelson |
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Judges and their clerks now serve as a central hub for digital information in the courtrooms of Georgia's new $35 million Coweta County Justice Center. The decision to build the new facility was made when the county outgrew the single courtroom in its historic brick courthouse.
A century had passed since the construction of Coweta County's landmark courthouse, and it was widely known that the time had come to build a facility for the next 100 years. Not only would this facility house several "shell" courtrooms to be built out for future expansion, it would also house plenty of extra cabling conduit to support the evolution of technology.
Coweta County's charming 1904 courthouse still stands in the center of town, but it has adjourned for the last time. Now court is in session at the 120,000-square-foot judicial complex, which opened last summer. While the exteriors of the new courthouse building and the adjacent juvenile court were designed to echo the region's traditional architecture, the facilities' interiors reflect the most modern advancements in courtroom technology.
Members of the judicial staff led the charge for an AV evolution. In particular, chief magistrate Judge Jim Stripling relied on his personal interest in audio recording and technology when members of the court began meeting with Atlanta-based audiovisual consultant EDI.
"We came from a one-room courthouse with a PA system in it," Stripling explained, adding that most of the judges in Coweta County had practiced law in many high-tech courtrooms and knew what types of equipment and services they were looking for in their new courthouse. "We wanted the technology to be the best possible, and we wanted a system that was easy for attorneys and judges to use."
Each floor of the new courthouse houses a different branch of the judiciary, but the core of all the courtroom systems is the same. The courtrooms each have their own local equipment rack, facilitating use by courtroom staff and also preventing widespread disaster in the event of equipment failure.
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AV technology for the building is centralized only in one aspect, the Tandberg videoconferencing codecs which connect the rooms to the outside world. All the courtrooms are videoconference-enabled with PTZ cameras and microphones at every position, but because it's unlikely that all the systems will be used at once, they share two codecs.
The AV design for the courthouse was completed in the early architectural design phases, so when the time came to install the systems, there were new technological solutions available. EDI collaborated with the systems integrator on the project, Audio Visual Innovations, to update the design to meet the new requests made by court personnel. The result was a robust audio and video distribution system enhanced with the latest features for connectivity and control.
Arranging For Video Arraignment
First on the docket for the modification of the AV design was remote arraignment. The original plan was to outfit some of the courtrooms for videoconferencing, but by the time construction began, the judges were very interested in enabling video arraignment, especially in the magistrate courts, where arraignments are a major function every day.
The Coweta County jail is only a couple of miles away from the courthouse, but the enhanced security provided by remote arraignment, along with the savings in transportation and personnel costs, prompted the construction of a remote courthouse facility in the jail. "We ended up adding video arraignment for each of the courtrooms in the main building," recalled David McLaughlin, account manager at AVI's Atlanta office.
Video arraignment proceedings are recorded onto DVD, and electronic signatures are captured with an Interlink signature pad. Vaddio video cameras offered a tremendous infrastructure benefit. "Vaddio's cameras use Cat-5 cabling for the control, the video, and power," McLaughlin said, "so it becomes more of a nice, clean installation with Cat-5 cabling replacing a video cable, a power cable, and a control cable."
The cameras are controlled via the judges' and clerks' Crestron touch panels, which also serve as video displays for those positions in the courtroom. When the button for video arraignment is pressed, the cameras move to preset positions for that procedure.
The Cat-5 cabling infrastructure was used for video distribution throughout the facility. "We sent a lot of our video via Cat-5 primarily to save on floor boxing connection space, especially underneath the lecterns," explained Brian Murphey, senior audio-visual consultant with EDI. "If you have three sources there and you break them out as BNC connections, it will take up a lot of space fast and you have a huge bundle of cables. So by sending it down via Cat-5, you reduce the number of connectors and wiring -- and make the floor box more neat and orderly and easier to connect and disconnect."
Distance was not an impedance to the decision to go with Cat-5, as the equipment racks for each of the courtrooms are located in local telecommunications closets, which mean the longest distance video would have to travel was approximately 200 feet. Magenta Research Multi-View twisted pair systems were used to transport the video over Cat-5.
McLaughlin added that Cat-5 presents other benefits as well. "The conduit sizes can be much smaller, so the infrastructure costs are lower," he said, adding that extra Cat-5 was pulled to future-proof the facility. "Cat-5 also prevents the ground-loop problems caused by the electrical system on large projects like this."
The output for all the video sources in the courtrooms consists of LCD video displays. NEC 17-inch monitors were selected for counsel desks and for the court reporters, while 15-inch displays were installed in the jury boxes. Motorized projection screens were installed in the ceiling of each courtroom, but aesthetics as well as the judge's desire for more control over the display of video content made a portable projector the appropriate solution. Several attorneys do make use of the mobile projector cart for cases where a large-screen image is required.
Annotation was another technology that the judges were eager to add to the system, so a 17-inch Elo touch panel was used at the witness stand, and a Crestron DTT18 18-inch touch panel was selected for the bench and the clerk's desk.
Intracacies Of The Interfaces
With so many video displays and so much content and annotation flowing around the courtroom via Extron routers and scalers, the control interface was a significant piece of the system. AVI and EDI met with courthouse personnel numerous times to perfect the numerous interfaces. The result was a multi-faceted approach to control.
Attorneys have simple push-button interfaces to submit evidence to the judge, who then distributes it to the other screens in the courtroom. The lectern touch panel allows for video and audio sources to be used for other evidence media, including images from a WolfVision visual presenter and a JVC DVD/VCR player.
Finally, the judge and the clerk have nearly identical control screens, so if a judge is not particularly interested in becoming an AV guru he can enable the clerk to run the show. The judge has two unique functions on the touch panel -- a "kill switch" that mutes audio and video, and a "sidebar" button that triggers sound masking through a RDL white noise generator positioned above the jury box. The latter grants the judge and counselors privacy for discussions held at the bench.
MORE INFO
AVI aviinc.com
Crestron Electronics crestron.com
EDI ediltd.com
Elo elotouch.com
Extron Electronics extron.com
Interlink interlinkelectronics.com
JVC jvc.com/pro
Magenta Research magenta-research.com
NEC nec.com
RDL rdlnet.com
Tandberg tandberg.com
Vaddio vaddio.com
Wolfvision wolfvision.com
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