Speaking to the Criminal Bar Association last week, Attorney General Dominic Grieve MP said that protecting the fairness of trials was becoming increasingly more difficult with rise in online media and blogging. He went on to say that website owners should be responsible for posts and comments and he hopes to have ‘further discussions’ owners’ liability.
It is common for parties involved in publishing material relating to a current or upcoming trial to escape from the issue of liability under the argument that they innocently passed on materials. Distributors of said material can claim that they were unaware of that the material was information in a trial. Site owners could claim the same thing for comments made on their website on until they are made aware of a connection to a trial.
Though the proliferation of online publishing and distribution will continue to be an issue, Dominic Grieve went on to say the following in his comments:
"Does the system presently work? In blunt terms and with doubtless imperfections, in my view, it does. Although my office receives a substantial number of queries from legal representatives, the courts, the judiciary, members of the public and also members of the press there have been a comparatively small number of prosecutions under either the 1981 [Contempt of Court] Act or for breaches of other specific restrictions."
Issues of censorship, privacy, and multi-channel information distribution will no doubt shape this debate as it continues to become a bigger issue. For now we will wait and see.
The real enemy of fairness in trials is the progressive withdrawal of defendants' rights, previously available since the Golden Age.
The government's argument about blogs is a mere diversionary tactic, to disguise their own incompetence, particularly that of the CPS.
It should be noted that a jury is not designed to defend against prejudice from other people; it is designed to defend against over zealous and sometimes politically motivated Crown prosecutions.
Blogs are little more than gossip in written form and the internet is doing us all a service by making such information sources independent of the government and their tame editors in Fleet St, which is the real reason they don't like it. It's a bizzare notion that in days gone by a nasty crime in a small town wouldn't have been talked about by people, some of whom would have inevitably ended up on the jury. By complaining about blogs the Attorney General is moving the goal posts: in the past the definition of impartiality was that you had no special interest in the case; the new definition seems to be having no knowledge which excludes everybody except the really stupid or liars. The objective of the government is to avoid public scrutiny of justice by closing down debate and freedom of speech.
The real problem with jury trials is that since the property qualification was dropped they are biassed towards the left wing and lazy. They are also often unlikely to consist of the peers of the accused, as required by the Magan Carta. For example, a City trader accused of insider trading would not today be tried by fellow traders but by the unemployed of Tower Hamlets. The Government's response to miscarriages of justice so caused is not to fix the jury composition problem but to seek simply to abolish the right trial by jury.
A fully free discussion of legal process would expose how far the modern legal process has fallen from its ancient principles and engender a discussion that politicians are desperate to avoid. No wonder they don't like blogs.
Posted by: Scary Biscuits | 18/10/2010 at 01:45 PM