The media hates it when courts issue suppression orders. It means that they can’t run juicy stories and publish incriminating photographs of people accused of heinous crimes. But there is a reason why suppression orders have become much more commonplace in recent years and it is because of the irresponsibility of the media and the lynch mobs it generates.
This is the point Andrew Dodd missed yesterday in his piece on a case in South Australia involving an MP who is charged with s-x offences but whose name has been suppressed.
Lawyers argue for suppression orders to ensure that their client gets a fair trial. In other words, that his or her name is not subjected to biased, malicious, and ill-informed reporting by the media, which will make it harder for an individual to be judged purely on the evidence before the court, and not on emotive and prejudicial images and stories that have been published in the lead-up to the trial.
The media is to blame for the growth of suppression orders. Take Brendan Sokaluk, for example. Sokaluk was arrested shortly after the February 2009 Victorian bushfires. Vigilante groups set up Facebook pages, his family was harassed and subject to media stories and the Herald Sun was forced to remove readers’ comments from its stories on him. That newspaper also ran stories about Sokaluk, which portrayed him as a “loner who went to a special school, he tried to become a CFA volunteer for years but was always knocked back.” Channel 7 news even doorstopped Sokaluk’s father.
More recently, in May this year, a Sydney couple were charged with murdering their young daughter. TV news bulletins ran images of people screaming at the couple as they were driven away in a police car. So much for the presumption of innocence — it was trashed by this footage of the mob baying for blood.
And then there is the notorious case of Dennis Ferguson, a man with a criminal history that included s-x offences, who was subjected to having the media and an angry mob of locals out the front of his house and who was called a “monster” by the Gold Coast Bulletin in the lead-up to his trial.
In fact, in the case of s-x offences, it is arguable that a person’s name should be suppressed until after they have been found guilty, if that is the outcome of their case. This is because the media hounds them and their name is ruined for ever by virtue of the nature of the offence with which they are charged.
Suppression orders are a necessary antidote to media sensationalism and bias, and vigilantism, of the online and physical form. The right to a fair trial is paramount as is the presumption of innocence. Suppression orders ensure that this remains the case.
*Greg Barns is national president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance and is a barrister.
well put but I assumed everyone knew this.
Good to read this follow on from Dodd’s story. Some people seem to get swept away with the media frenzy about ‘freedom of the free press’ and forget how it can subvert the service of justice in our courts.
I still remember the media involvement in the Azaria Chamberlain case and the media circus that hounded all involved and there was nothing ‘free’ or ‘just’ about it.
This is a timely reminder from Greg about the importance of supression orders. However, what I think he’s missed about my piece is that I do understand the need for supression orders and I do support them for all of the reasons he has outlined. The media does need to be reined in and sensational coverage curtailed. But what is crazy about the case in South Australia is that the supression order isn’t working because EVERYONE knows who the alleged offender is. Consequently the media is writing duplicitous stuff in order to comply with a supression order that is not protecting anyone. This has become ludicrous. My piece is not about freedom of the press. It is about a law that has become an ass and the need to think about this in order to fix it.
Andrew, don’t you think that the current SA case is unique though, in that it involves someone in public office. The tensions between laws to protect the public (and in this case children) and those in public office is not new, but we can not have one law for those and another for everyone else. Not all laws are perfect and work all the time as the legislator intended, but I would argue that does not necessitate chucking them out and not all situations can be accommodated in legislation.