The 167th District Court
The Court Reporter
My
name is Jim King. I am the official court reporter for the 167th District Court in Austin, Texas. It is my responsibility to make a record of every
word spoken during official proceedings in court and to type those words if
requested. Sometimes, such as in a death penalty trial, the typewritten record
of the trial is several thousand pages, bound into as many as 60 or 70 volumes
or more. Most jury trials, however, take less than a week and are less than
2,500 pages.
Some colleges and many vocational schools teach the skill needed to be a court
reporter. After about six months of studying the basic theory, the student
begins speed-building. Learning to write faster is self-paced, but it generally
takes two to four years and sometimes more.
The theory teaches students to use their hands to duplicate phonetic
sounds.
When we speak, we make sounds with our tongues, throat, lips, et cetera. Court
reporters learn to make “sounds” on paper with their hands by
typing various combinations of the 22 keys on our stenographic machines, sometimes
many keys in the same stroke. This produces what looks like typed garble on
a 2-inch wide ribbon of paper, but it represents the sounds we heard, and
later we must translate those phonetic symbols back into English. Most
reporters now use computers that translate their notes automatically.
In Texas, aspiring reporters must pass a test that consists of listening to
three five-minute takes of people talking, after which the candidate must
type the words with 95 percent accuracy. The three takes are testimony in
question-and-answer format at 225 words a minute, a jury charge at 200 words
a minute, and a literary -- one voice giving a speech -- at 180 words a minute.
Our court generally hears only criminal cases. We alternate jury trial weeks
with docket call weeks. In docket call, people accused of crime appear before
the judge and are arraigned, or they agree to plead guilty in exchange for
some punishment terms agreed to by the district attorney, or they appear before
the judge to be sentenced. Sometimes during docket call pretrial hearings are
held when there is a question of law, such as whether a search was conducted
legally. All of that is on the record. A lot of routine court business that
is not on the record takes place during docket call too.
Court reporters are well compensated for the work they do, but it can be a
tough job. An official reporter must be careful about managing his time, because
it is not unusual to have a long trial followed by a busy docket call followed
by another heavy duty trial, and before he realizes it the reporter can be
two or three trials behind with more trials coming up. Most reporters accept
working on their transcripts at night or on the weekends during busy times
as just part of the job.
Last Modified: Friday, March 13, 2009 3:50 PM
