Contempt of court – what’s the point?

Supermodel and privacy campaigner Naomi Campbell today admitted assaulting two police officers at Heathrow Airport. The news would not have come as a surprise to readers of The Sun who were told by the supersoaraway in a front-page splash on April 4 that NAOMI SPAT IN COP’S FACE. Although the intro to the story included the word allegedly there were no quote marks or qualifications around the headline. The main story went on to say that Naomi was crazed and had gone berserk.  This is interesting because as every student journalist knows, reporters are in danger of falling foul of the Contempt of Court Act if they publish anything that could create a substantial risk of serious prejudice once a case has been deemed active – eg if an arrest has been made. In this instance Campbell had indeed been arrested, as the copy pointed out, when the April 4 story was written. I don’t want to see The Sun being prosecuted for contempt – I’ve always thought that jurors could be trusted to try cases on the basis of evidence before them, rather than what they may have read in the papers. Important factors such as the time between publication and the likely date of any trial (and indeed whether there would be a jury trial) would also have been taken into account, but cases such as this one show that the contempt legislation is looking more and redundant. When it comes to alleged terrorist cases, it seems that any amount of information can be published before trial with no danger of contempt proceedings being brought.  

Traditionally judges in Scotland have been tougher on contempt than the courts in England – although high profile cases in the late 1990s relaxed to a large extent this traditional strict view. The European Convention on Human Rights – with its free speech article – has been particularly important in this regard. There was another interesting example this week when The Sun’s front page splash on Thursday carried the headline GOT HIM over the story of the arrest of a suspect in the Moira Jones murder case. 

For those of us who teach law for journalists all this makes the area of contempt of court very challenging – indeed given current practice is it not time this aspect of the law was looked at again so that there is greater clarity of what is and is not now acceptable?