Courtroom Sketches

The Courtroom Sketch is a kind of 19th century graphic journalism, which is alive and well in the 21st century partly because of the intensified photo ban in and around the court.

When the Courtroom drawing genre works best, it is a depiction of a person’s past, present and future compressed in the crucial and revealing time before verdict. Sometimes the defendant is portrayed in sequence of different moments from his first court appearance to final sentencing, which is also a kind of graphic storytelling.

On the left side you can see a small sample of Courtroom drawings. Jorgen Bitsch made hundreds of these within the last decade- including almost all terror cases in and a lot of homicide cases in Denmark.