SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Witnesses testifying in an upcoming criminal trial will be required to wear transparent face masks to keep the court in compliance with San Francisco’s public health directive, a state court judge ruled Thursday.
“This court’s number one priority is the health and safety of those who enter the courthouse and the prisoners in county jails,” San Francisco Superior Court Judge Vedica Puri said at a pretrial hearing at the Hall of Justice Thursday morning.
Holding up a bundle of transparent masks wrapped in plastic, she added, “The court finds this to be a solution.”
Puri’s ruling comes in response to a motion filed by Deputy Public Defender Sierra Villaran to allow face shields to be used during the critical moments of a jury trial for a man accused of residential burglary.
Villaran had proposed that the court require both cloth face masks and transparent shields for witnesses, who would remove the masks on the stand and testify while wearing just the shields, so jurors could still read their facial expressions and assess their credibility. Witnesses will also sit behind plexiglass panels.
“Micro-expressions are so critical,” Villaran said, adding that her client has the constitutional right under the Sixth Amendment to confront witnesses in open court.
But Puri said “transparent masks more than suffice to protect the right to confrontation.”
She cited Maryland v. Craig, where the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment does not guarantee a criminal defendant the absolute right to a face-to-face confrontation with witnesses.
Puri said protecting the public from a deadly virus is also the court’s primary concern, and that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause must be interpreted in that context.
“I was a trial lawyer. I’m very sympathetic to the notion of reading faces — jurors’ faces, witnesses’ faces, everyone’s faces,” Puri said. “But we are in a pandemic and that takes precedence.”
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting stay-at-home orders has thrown a wrench into the whole process of holding a jury trial. Courts throughout California put trials on hold while they tried to figure out how to safely assemble jurors and have multiple attorneys, court employees, bailiffs, and the press and public in one place while keeping everyone six feet apart.
“We have adapted to a new way of life,” Puri said. “The very way we have been functioning has been upended and has forced us to change. So must our court operations.”
The judge nixed the face shield idea, saying it wasn’t up to her to determine whether shields are more or less effective than masks at preventing the spread of Covid-19. “It’s not for me to undo the current order we are under,” she said.
Villaran had filed a declaration from Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, who said face shields could keep people safe in the courtroom for hours. Puri found Chin-Hong’s declaration conclusory and noted that San Francisco’s public health order on face coverings makes no mention face shields as an option.
Villaran had also asked that jurors be given face shields during voir dire, and that her client be allowed to wear only a face shield during the trial to inhibit juror bias.





