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NZ Herald archives really in contempt?
By Steven | December 3, 2007
The Solicitor-General has told the NZ Herald to take some stories off its archives, because they are in contempt of court. The stories contain (presumably prejudicial) information about murder accused Liam James Reid/Julian Edgecombe.
I don’t know what this material is. It may, for example, contain information about previous convictions.
If the judge specifically suppressed this information, it would be a crime to publish it, and possibly a contempt of court too. If the judge didn’t, we need to ask whether its availability creates a real risk of prejudice to his upcoming trial. I would have thought this is not very likely: not many people are likely to access it, and the chances of those people becoming jurors is very likely to be remote. I suppose there may be an argument that someone might stick it up on a blog, or it may become well known by some other avenue. It may be a contempt to put that material on the blog (if it were sufficiently well read), but that contempt would be committed by the blogger. No doubt close to the trial, particularly when jurors have been selected and one might be tempted to do a news search, the risk of prejudice might become a real one. But I doubt it’s serious enough now. Still, if the S-G had made a polite request to the Herald and the Knowledge Basket and whoever else, a reasonable response would be to comply.
Still, the Herald is demonstrating a typical journalistic naivety about contempt with the following sentence:
The request opens significant questions of law, especially whether the courts can force the removal of information that has been in the public domain for some time.
As the Herald should know full well, there’s really no issue here: the courts do have this power. It often happens in contempt cases that material that has already been published must be suppressed as the trial approaches. Think Bain, for example. Anyone with electronic archives (major bloggers, this means you too) probably ought to think about setting up a system to take down prejudicial material when major court cases loom. Obviously, this is a bit problematic. I wonder whether the police and S-G ought to set up some sort of reminder system?
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