Donald Trump is about to be prosecuted, but unless you’re one of the few people who might be allowed inside the courtroom in Manhattan, you won’t be able to watch. That’s because New York is the only state in the country that still bans cameras in legal trials.

Given the political stakes of prosecuting a former president who is again running for office, the public needs to observe the strength of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case rather than rely on others to tell them how the evidence shakes out — especially given Trump and his allies’ penchant for spreading disinformation. With confidence in the media and courts at an all-time low, will the public trust the outcome of the case if they can’t see it for themself? To ask the question is to answer it. With the future of other criminal probes unclear, Bragg’s prosecution may be the only public reckoning we get of Trump’s alleged criminality.

Televised court hearings have been around for many decades, but they were quite controversial at first. In the 1960’s, the Supreme Court overturned two criminal convictions (Estes v. Texas and Sheppard v. Maxwell) on the basis of disruptive media behavior inside the courtroom. Through the late 1970’s, most states continued to bar cameras from courtrooms. Then Florida launched an experimental program pioneering camera access in its state courts, which culminated in the Supreme Court formally blessing courtroom cameras in the 1981 case Chandler v. Florida. Dozens of states then followed Florida’s lead, and the wave gave rise to CourtTV and countless high-profile trials — including what was in 1995 the most-watched television event in American history: the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Seventy-five percent of adults, or 150 million viewers, tuned in.

Despite the nationwide popularity of the practice, New York and the District of Columbia continue to ban audio-visual coverage in courts. New York ran a successful trial program adding cameras in the 1990’s, but then-state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver blocked permanent implementation (perhaps foreseeing his own future prosecution). More recently, New York courts made audio recordings of trials available to the public, but only as an emergency measure due to the lack of physical access amid the COVID-19 pandemic.