BIG NEWS

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Why give him name suppression?

Yesterday, police were on the lookout for Vanessa Pickering, who disappeared with a man whom we cannot name, but yesterday his name was all over the papers. The man appeared in court today and got interim name suppression. Pickering’s body was found today.

Many media reports have been written about this case since Pickering went missing on Monday. Most of the ones on Stuff are catalogued on a page which you can access by searching "Vanessa Pickering", but every single story has had their links changed to this story. All had one line summaries to the story and one even had the suppressed man's name - which begs the question, why change the links when the name is identifiable from the one or two line description?

But on this 3News story Christchurch man gets name suppression there’s a helpful list of related articles in the sidebar, which gives the man’s name.

I have nothing against interim name suppression in some cases, but this case isn’t one of them, particularly given his previous convictions.

Labels:

Scoopit!

2 Comments:

Blogger Eric Crampton said...

Odds that the victim's name gets suppressed too later on to protect the identity of the daughter, if she were victim of anything particularly nasty as well?

February 12, 2010 at 11:41 AM  
Blogger Keeping Stock said...

But who did the media get the name from in the first place? Why, none other than - the NZ Police!

Isn't it a trifle ironic that one one hand, the police are prosecuting Cam Slater for breaching a suppression order over a man (The Olympian) who has yet to be tried, whilst on the other hand, they are denying an arrested (and presumed innocent) person the right to apply for name suppression by giving the media his name.

Does anyone else see the double standard?

February 12, 2010 at 3:39 PM  

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