TV Reivew : ‘Shock Video 2’ Looks at Crime

In their follow-up to “Shock Video,” a look at how camcorders are making everyone a potential TV journalist, producer-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have shifted to much more sensitive ground with “Shock Video 2: The Show Business of Crime and Punishment.”

This HBO “America Undercover” special is a virtual smorgasbord of Court TV trial clips, murder and crime scenes on tape, and some pretty wacky examples of TV appropriating the trial room. Somehow, though, as we’re deep into the O.J. trial, much of “Shock Video 2” isn’t all that shocking.

Lawyers and police know how shocking, though, the taped “walk-through” of a murder scene can be for a jury (and the examples here make “Shock Video 2” absolutely off-limits to younger viewers). If the images are too much, says Art Garrett of the Alameda County district attorney’s staff, the jury will turn away.

So it is with everything in the law and video: Tape can cut both ways. Bailey and Barbato smartly include clips of Dr. Jack Kervorkian’s patient sessions, used effectively in his defense to show that he didn’t coerce patients to suicide. Attorney Harland Braun explains that when jury members repeatedly viewed taped clips showing the deaths of Vic Morrow and two children on the set of “The Twilight Zone,” their initial horror gave way to a desensitized but more proper judgment of the technical causes of the deaths.

While police and defense lawyers have both found that video buttresses their cases, the use of cameras in the courtroom is a dicier issue. Aside from having Phil Donahue perhaps disingenuously argue for their presence, and media scholar George Gerbner argue against, Bailey and Barbato offer nothing new here. They rehash all the old cases we know too well, the sickly bouillabaisse of O.J.s, Menendi,William Kennedy Smiths, Bobbitts, et al.

Ah, but there’s a capper. We see bits of lawyer/TV personality Star Jones’ “Jones & Jury,” which cynically and absurdly blends afternoon talk-show circus with “jury trial” modes. Even more absurd is “Jones & Jury” executive producer Howard Schultz defending this stuff as somehow in the spirit of Jefferson and Washington.

This, plus clips of Donahue’s aborted attempt at taping a real execution, show that videotape is fine, but videotape in the hands of commercial TV can be a dangerous thing.

* “Shock Video 2: The Show Business of Crime and Punishment” airs at 10:15 tonight on HBO, with repeats Tuesday, Friday, July 24, 27 and Aug. 2.