Former President Donald Trump's criminal trial not being televised is both preventing the public from seeing a judge acting as a "tyrant," and failing to offer a "check on partisan reporting," according to legal expert Alan Dershowitz.
The Harvard Law School professor emeritus attended the trial earlier this week to see former federal prosecutor Robert Costello testify.
Dershowitz was allowed to remain in the courtroom when Judge Juan M. Merchan briefly forced reporters into the hallway so he could admonish the witness for raising his eyebrows at the judge.
"Many experienced lawyers raised their eyebrows when the judge excluded obviously relevant evidence when offered by the defense, while including irrelevant evidence offered by the prosecution," Dershowitz wrote in a Tuesday New York Post opinion column.
"But when the defense's only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's rulings, the court went berserk.
"Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media."
Dershowitz wrote that Merchan "threatened to strike all of Costello's testimony if he raised his eyebrows again."
"That of course would have been unconstitutional because it would have denied the defendant his Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses and to raise a defense," Dershowitz wrote.
"It would have punished the defendant for something a witness was accused of doing."
Dershowitz added that even "if what Costello did was wrong, and it was not, it would be utterly improper and unlawful to strike his testimony — testimony that undercut and contradicted the government's star witness."
"The judge's threat was absolutely outrageous, unethical, unlawful and petty," he wrote.
Dershowitz, a Democrat who defended Trump in the then-president's first impeachment trial, summed up what he saw on Monday.
"[I]n my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday," he wrote.
"The judge in Donald Trump's trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn."
The legal professor said Americans should have been able to see the judge in action. Instead, they must rely on the biased reporting of partisan journalists.
"Even when journalists do report on courtroom proceedings, their accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. When you watch CNN or MSNBC, you generally see an account of a trial that never took place," Dershowitz wrote.
"They spin the events so much that reality is totally distorted."
Dershowitz cited reports that he had a spat with a former student, when in fact, the two men chatted in a friendly manner.
"There is absolutely no good reason why a trial of this importance, or any trial, should not be televised live and in real time," he wrote.
"Allowing the public to see their courts in action is the best guarantee of fairness.
"As Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said a century ago, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'"
The Associated Press contributed to this story.