Comment on the reporters' transcripts, Scientology v. Armstrong, LASC No. C 420153
Gerry Armstrong
In the posted and webbed transcripts of the 1984 Los Angeles Superior
Court Armstrong I trial we have attempted to duplicate the hard copy
that was created by the court reporters. This duplication, including
page numbering, line breaks, line numbering, paragraphing and spelling
makes the electronic transcript generally dependable for legal
purposes. Our product therefore contains the transcription errors that
were made during the trial.
There were two court reporters throughout the trial, and they switched
off, one catching the words of the trial participants by stenotype,
and the other reporter, in an adjacent office, preparing the
transcript of the words he or she had just caught. Then the reporters
switched places and functions. Trial transcripts were thus available
to the parties' attorneys every morning for the previous day's
proceedings.
Court reporters write with the stenotype phonetically, rather than
letter by letter as with a standard keyboard. Some of the errors in
the trial transcripts are therefore phonetic, either deliberately by
the reporter, since he or she couldn't stop the proceeding to get a
spelling of some name never heard before, or inadvertently because
something was misheard or misrecorded.
E.g., from the Volume 13 transcript:
p. 2038 "they are since tried and not ours." = their sins are tried
and not ours.
p. 2039 "Bal Neil" = [Lord] Balniel.
http://www.xenu.net/archive/audit/balniel.html
p. 2133 "Brahms works" = Problems of Work.
http://www.gerryarmstrong.org/50grand/legal/a1/rt-1984-05-16.html
With current court reporting technology, most of these errors would
not have occurred, and the court reporters would not have had to do
much of the scrambling they did.
Because the reporters switched off, some spelling errors and phonetic
errors switched on and off with them. Some errors are just
typographical or inattention. The speaker is a few times
misidentified, and pages misnumbered.
The transcript is I think pretty clear, although there are some errors
as mentioned that we have preserved. A few errors get "corrected"
during the OCRing, and a few might get "corrected" during the
checking. Page misnumbering was corrected if not correcting it was
stupid.
If something is not clear, let us know. We're missing a few transcript
pages, so if anyone has a set of transcript volumes also let us know.
© Gerry Armstrong
http://www.gerryarmstrong.org
mail. com
<ge...@gerryarmstrong.org> wrote:
> http://www.gerryarmstrong.org/50grand/legal/a1/index.html#appeal
Gerry--- I have been slogging through these transcripts and it
just utterly disgusts me what the "legal system" does to people,
money, reason, sanity, and justice. It's like a parody of some
insane science fiction movie where up is down, left is right, and
black is only black if all parties are paid to believe black is
black. The USA "legal system" in these transcripts clearly exist
only to preventthe truth from being revealed to the court / jury /
judge; if any facts accidently happen to slip in, the "legal
system" leaps in to squash and destroy and silence it.
It is a no wonder at all that the sides with the most money always
wins, regardless of merit or justice or fairness.
---
http://lastliberal.org
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