Andrew Dickens: Suppression needs review in social media age

Author: Andrew Dickens ,
Publish Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2015, 7:13am

An ugly little game broke out in our newsroom yesterday morning.

It all started with a story from the courts.

An award-winning kiwi actor has been accused of sex offences against four women.

So the man, in his 40s, appeared in Auckland District Court, where he pleaded not guilty to four counts of indecent assault and two of sexual violation, all between 2010 and 2013. There's a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in jail for some of the charges. But of course the name was suppressed.

So the question rang in out the room , “Do we know who the guy is?”. Newsrooms are privy to many things that we can't broadcast and we're all aware of the risks both to the the processes of the law and also the risks to our company if we say the wrong thing publically. And, we also have court reporters who are there and of course you can't suppress what they've seen with their own eyes.

So often we know what we can't say. But yesterday no-one knew.

And so the speculation started. 3 names sprang quickly to mind. Because how many award winning kiwi actors are there? Those names were discounted because the suppression orders also allowed the exact age of the alleged offenders. He's 45 apparently. So the 43, 47 and 49 year old actors that we speculated on were cleared. That's because we know how to research.

However this horrified me and others because we knew this same game would be played amongst others. So I checked social media yesterday and the game was rampant. Facebook, Twitter and particularly on Reddit. I still don't know the name but I know a lot of names have been thrown around.

All this made me wonder what the point of our suppression orders are. It's to guarantee a free and fair trial. But the names I've seen bandied around have not been treated fairly. There's only one alleged offender but I've seen 10 names mentioned. If the chattering classes have got close and one of those 10 have been charged then there's 9 others who have been unfairly impugned.

You've got to ask the judge why he would suppress a man's name but not his occupation and his age which narrows down the potential New Zealanders to a couple of handfuls. If he was a 45 year old accountant it wouldn’t be a problem.

It makes you start to wonder if our judiciary and lawmakers need to have a decent conversation about what they're really trying to achieve. It's the balance between the process of justice needing to be seen to be done and defending the reputation of the accused if found not guilty.

To date we've done this atrociously. Innocent people have been identified and vilified while monsters like Tony Robertson, who killed Blessie Gotingco, have enjoyed a free ride. He kept his name suppressed through the entire 4 week trial and even more shockingly he kept his criminal record secret from the jury.

Our suppression laws seem to criminalise the innocent by innuendo and protect the guilty through worthiness. Our justice system is guilty of thinking too much and not using common sense. It's a common complaint and the judicial industry needs to answer it.