Tuesday, January 22, 2002

Newspaper archives It is a principle in many jurisdictions that a jury should not know about prior charges or convictions of the accused. In a Scottish court a man was accused of a particularly revolting crime, he having been acquitted of a similar offence on a technicality a number of years ago. The judge ruled that the editor of a newspaper was in contempt of court by leaving reports of the earlier trial on line in his archive, because he had made it too easy for jurors to find out what they were not meant to know. The judge apparently believed that the greater ease of access of the on line archive as compared to a paper archive was a difference not of degree but of kind. Roger Needham ["Roger Needham" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 88] 0:00 # G!