Press "potentially falling into same pitfalls" as Chris Jefferies scenario over April Jones suspect warns legal expert
The press has been warned that it is possibly making the same mistakes as those made over the naming if Chris Jefferies as a murder suspect in naming the man arrested in the April Jones abduction case.
Legal expert Jane Hardy, at Sheridans, has warned the press that they are “potentially falling into the same pitfalls as the Mr Jefferies scenario,” in their reporting of the April Jones abduction case. Police took the unusual step of confirming the identity of the man they had arrested on suspicion of abduction and issuing his photograph earlier this morning. Since then news websites have been awash with information about the 46 year-old suspect.
Details currently available on the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mirror websites include information regarding his employment history, love life, and relationship with April and her family. Its information like this that Hardy believes is leading the press down the same troubled path it took reporting on Chris Jefferies involvement in the Joanna Yates murder case during 2010/2011, “they [the press] are entitled to report the facts that have been and that are surrounding this particular enquiry. What they’re not entitled to do is draw any conclusions or prejudice the investigation.”
Hardy adds the fact that the police have revealed the identity of the 46 year-old man so early on in the investigations could also cause an issue as “the difficulty the press may face is they might introduce an element of pre-judging in whether or not he was merely just providing information as a neighbour, or he was in fact was able to assist them.”
She continued: “There is no difficulty in sticking to the facts. It’s when they [the press] start to provide more information as to whether the line has been crossed.
“I think the difficulty is that the Jefferies line was quite clearly drawn and it is a danger to repeat that at such an early stage of the enquiry by automatically putting out more information than is strictly factual.”
When questioned whether the police were right to release the suspect’s identity, she explained: “The difficulty is that there is a tension, a natural tension, between the desire to provide as much information as possible and the difficulty of, perhaps creating a situation of pre-judging by making certain information available to the public.
“[In providing] this background information [the press] might well fall into the Jefferies trap and it is an editorial judgement call but, in my view, in light of what happened to Jefferies I would say [the press should] err on the side of caution.”