07 Jun 12 | Index Index, minipost, United Kingdom
The Spectator has been ordered to pay £5,600 after admitting a November 2011 article about the trial of Stephen Lawrence‘s killers breached a court order. Associate editor Rod Liddle’s piece claimed defendants Gary Dobson and David Norris — who were convicted in January 2012 of Lawrence’s 1993 murder — would not get a fair trial. It appeared in the magazine after the trial had started and an order imposed on reports that could influence the jury’s view of the defendants. The judge said the article caused a brief moment in which the trial was in jeopardy, but the magazine’s swift apology and removal of the piece online meant it was not undermined. The magazine’s lawyer apologised for its “bitterly regrettable” failure to make checks.
07 Jun 12 | Uncategorized
Rod Liddle was stupid to write his article on the trial of Gary Dobson and David Norris, and the Spectator was stupid to publish it. Now the magazine has been fined — not for contempt of court, though anyone with a faint awareness of media law knows that law was broken, but for the even more straightforward offence of breaching a court order. A judge said don’t do it and they did it: it doesn’t get simpler.
Does the incident raise any more complicated issues? No doubt the case will be made.
Liddle thought the trial of Dobson and Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence was unfair, and he expressed this view in the Spectator while the trial was in progress. No problem there, you may think, except that well-established and well-known English law forbids such opinionating in public while the justice process is under way.
It does so, not as a form of authority-inspired censorship, not to inhibit discussion about the justice system and not because the system doesn’t really trust jurors, but to protect the weak and the innocent. The law exists because defendants, their lawyers and others who cared about justice argued for it and won the argument.
Liddle knew this. Now he may disagree with the law, but in a democracy the normal course of action for people who want to change a law is to make the case for change rather than to break the law.
Equally, if he believes strongly that Norris and Dobson are victims of a miscarriage of justice he was free to make that case after the verdict. There are, sadly, plenty of miscarriages of justice and there are quite a lot of people who want to draw attention to them. With rare exceptions they do so within the law.
Does Liddle really disagree so fundamentally with the law on contempt that he feels the need to break it? Does he really care so much about the case of Norris and Dobson that he will break the law to support them?
If so we can respect his views even if we question his methods, and perhaps we can look forward to seeing him engage in further acts of civil disobedience in pursuit of his cause. We can also expect him to explain that his past actions were calculated and deliberate (though the Spectator might not be happy about that).
If, on the other hand, this was a casual act of arrogance by someone who knew he personally would pay no price for it, how surprised would we be?
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and is a founder of the Hacked Off Campaign. in 2000, he won the Orwell Prize for his book The Case of Stephen Lawrence. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
15 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A leaked Daily Mail story about advances in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence undermined the probe into the teenager’s death, the Leveson Inquiry heard this morning.
The Metropolitan police’s DCI Clive Driscoll, who led the re-opened inquiry into the teenager’s murder, described a November 2007 meeting he sought to hold in secret with Stephen’s mother, Doreen, and her lawyers.
Driscoll said while he was on the train home that evening, he received a phone call saying a story following the meeting would be running in the Daily Mail the next day.
“Stephen’s family were distraught about this,” Driscoll wrote in his witness statement, adding that the story “undermined” the Met’s relationship with the Lawrence family. “When this happened it was almost like going back to square one,” he wrote.
“Every time a story leaked to the press I had to repair relations with the family,” he wrote, adding later that the volume of leaks led him to believe that “someone was deliberately attempting to disrupt the investigation”.
Driscoll said he had “nothing but respect” for Stephen Wright, the Mail journalist whose name appeared on the November 2007 story. “No-one has tried harder, no organisation has tried harder to bring justice to Stephen’s parents,” Driscoll said, “but we were getting there, and it was undermining that inquiry, and I can’t understand that.”
“I have admiration with what the paper did in supporting the family, I have admiration in Mr Wright pursuing it. The bit I can’t understand is why, when you get there, you would then do anything to undermine it.”
Driscoll says he does not know who leaked the story about the meeting to the Mail. As a result, “everyone became a suspect”.
He added that Wright was spoken to by the police following the story and did not write a second piece. The journalist also maintained that the article did not come from a police source.
“I do not believe Mr Wright would have done anything to deliberately undermine the investigation,” Driscoll wrote.
The officer also thanked the paper for choosing not to publish another piece related to the Lawrence inquiry, which he said would have had “a serious consequence on the investigation we were planning.”
Driscoll admitted that the nature of Lawrence’s murder in 1993 — one of the “defining murders of its time”, he said — meant it would always generate a certain amount of press interest. In his written evidence he noted that a “significant amount” of information about the investigation was being leaked to the media, namely the News of the World, in October 2007. “This was incredibly damaging,” he wrote.
Also in the witness box this morning was the Sun’s crime editor, Mike Sullivan, who said he believes that the Metropolitan police have grading charts on individual journalists with a marking system to show the favourability of the coverage towards the police. Yet the Met’s counsel, Neil Garnham QC, denied this was the case.
Sullivan also criticised the Filkin report into press-police relations for its “patronising” tone towards journalists, adding that he does not know any journalists who will “pour alcohol” down sources’ necks to get a story.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
