A week later, I’m still bitter about missing the most
fascinating and colorful trial of the decade, the racketeering case
against James “Whitey” Bulger, the Irish mobster who terrorized
South Boston for two decades, before evading capture for another 16
years. Last Monday, a federal jury found Bulger guilty of all but
one of 33 racketeering counts against him.

The Bulger story represents “the worst case of corruption in the
history of the F.B.I.,” says former Boston federal prosecutor
Michael D. Kendall, “a multigenerational, systematic alliance with
organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the
murders of government witnesses.”

But unless you’re from Boston, you probably missed it. That’s
largely due to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 53, which since
1946 has barred “broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the
courtroom.”

Most states have allowed cameras for decades, and the evidence
suggests they’ve had positive effects. Whatever justification the
federal ban once had, today it rests on the insulting notion that
you’re not mature enough to handle what goes on in the courtrooms
you pay for.

Admittedly, some of my bitterness stems from the base motivation
of wanting to see the show: to hear Patricia Donahue, the widow of
a Bulger victim, shout: “You’re a coward,” and Whitey’s snarl: “Do
what yas want with me.” Or this exchange with FBI agent Robert
Fitzpatrick: “Q: ‘Have any of your medications affected your
memory?’ A: ‘Not that I recall.’ “

Still, as the Boston Herald’s Margery Eagan insists, the Bulger
story — where it’s hard to tell the gangsters from the G-Men — is
“a civics lesson worthy of us all,” a “teachable moment” about
federal corruption. Alas, our government conspired with Boston’s
Irish Mafia for 20 years and all we got was this lousy sketch.

The camera ban treats “taxpayers … like 10-year-olds,” Eagan
argues, and for no good reason. In 1991, the Federal Judicial
Center evaluated a pilot program allowing cameras in the trial
courts of six districts. They reported “small or no effects of
camera presence on [the] participants, … courtroom decorum, or
the administration of justice.”

In a 2010 article, federal judge Alex Kozinski noted that
“judges overwhelmingly believed that cameras in the courtroom
helped to educate the public about the courts.”

The evidence from the states is much the same, the FJC concluded
in 1994: “Most jurors … indicated they were not distracted or
were distracted only at first” by cameras. Per Kozinski, “once a
trial gets under way,” participants “tend to forget the cameras are
there.”

Judge Kozinski’s ready for the “O.J.” objection: “You can’t talk
about cameras in the courtroom without talking about The Juice,” he
writes, whose clown-show trial in 1995 derailed the movement for
federal-court transparency.

But blaming the cameras is shooting the messenger, Kozinski
says; Without them, “dollars to doughnuts the jury would still have
voted to acquit, although the public wouldn’t be in nearly as good
a position” to judge the verdict or “evaluate the process that led
the jury to reach it.”

As it happens, the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev will be held in the same federal courthouse as the Bulger
trial.

In 2003, federal judge William Young gave convicted shoe-bomber
Richard Reid a marvelous dressing down: “You are not an enemy
combatant,” he told Reid, you’re a “species of criminal,” and “no
big deal.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have that on video?

I suspect if the Tsarnaev trial were televised, we’d see more
evidence that these guys aren’t criminal masterminds, but, in the
words of Uncle Ruslan, pathetic “losers,” and hardly a
justification for massive, secret surveillance programs.

That could provide a valuable civics lesson as well.

This column
originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.