The Defence Brief

To what extent is justice aided or hindered by press restriction? Since the arrest and imprisonment of Tommy Robinson for contempt of court there has been a lot of complaints from members of the public both in the UK and abroad who are concerned that a “journalist” could be imprisoned for doing their job in the UK. Americans seem particularly shocked at what has happened, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to investigate the law and consider why it is as it is. What is the law in the UK? Criminal contempt is a common law offence that involves a serious interference with the administration of justice or creates a real risk that the administration of justice will be prejudiced. It cannot be a mere non-compliance with court orders. Insofar as journalists and other publishers of news content go, section 1 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is very important because it tells us that where information is published with the intention of it being consumed by the public at l...

Reporting on the CJS is often ill-informed On the 17 th September 2015, the Daily Mail published a story entitled, “Judge rules it is right that child molester who abused ethnic minority girls got longer sentence because Asian sex crime victims suffer more than whites” .  Many people have commented on this story in the past few days including one barrister who said on Twitter , “HHJ Cahill and CA said Asian Children suffer more than white children of [sic] sexually abused.  Let that sink in for a second and then scream” Now, if any court said that it would be an outrage but neither HHJ Cahill in the Crown Court nor their Lordships in the Court of Appeal said anything of the sort.  Giving judgment of the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Walker said, “The remaining point taken by Mr Shafi [advocate for the appellant] is that the judge had, he submitted, regarded the offending as aggravated because of the victims’ ethnic and religious origin. This point is, with...