Adjudication No. 733 (June 1994) [1994] APC 42

ADJUDICATION NO. 733 (June 1994)

The Australian Press Council has dismissed a complaint by Graham Lane that a court report appearing in the Central Coast Sun Weekly was "distastefully and unnecessarily explicit in its detail" and further that the victim "could quite easily be identified from the article."

The report concerned a man who had pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a woman after inducing her to pose naked for photographs on the pretext that he was a freelance photographer.

Mr Lane accepted that the article was a comprehensive report of the case heard before the court but questioned the need for such detailed information to be publicly disclosed.

Public access to court proceedings is a cornerstone of the judicial system and the Australian Press Council accepts the right of a newspaper fully to report cases that come before the courts.

Criminal courts are necessarily concerned with conduct which is often distasteful but provided a newspaper's coverage of the evidence is fair and accurate, there is no breach of the Australian Press Council's principles. In the context of court reporting, those principles are concerned not so much with the subject matter but with the manner in which it is reported.

In relation to the possible identification of the victim, in view of the fact that no suppression order was made, and neither the victim nor the defendant was named in the article, there has been no breach of principle.

Although there has been no breach of principle, the Australian Press Council notes the Sun Weekly's response that:

"We are sensitive to the effects that such articles can have on both the victim and offenders, and following Mr Lane's letter we will continue to re-assess how we will deal with this issue in 1994".