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Teacher’s Pet podcast now raising ‘real risk of contempt’

With Chris Dawson now having been arrested and charged over the disappearance and alleged murder of his wife, Lynette Dawson, the ongoing availability of The Teacher’s Pet podcast for download raises serious concerns for due process, according to a Sydney-based partner.

user iconJerome Doraisamy 10 December 2018 Politics
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Speaking to Lawyers Weekly, Marque Lawyers partner Hannah Marshall said the issue stemming from podcasts such as The Teacher’s Pet is publishing evidence and opinions that might not form part of the evidence put to a jury in any subsequent trial.

“Any publication of that sort is a contempt of court when it is ‘sub judice’ (that is, when there is a prosecution underway),” she explained.

“In the case of The Teachers’ Pet, it wasn’t sub judice until this week when Chris Dawson was charged. Before then, there was no contempt risk. But allowing it to remain available now, following the charges, does raise a real risk of contempt.”

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The Teacher’s Pet is an “extraordinary and unprecedented example of press coverage of a crime prior to charges being laid”, she reflected. It has been reported that there are over 27 million downloads since its release, she said, and over a million of them occurred since Dawson was charged last week.

Extensive, adverse publicity such as this subsequently threatens the legitimacy of a jury trial, she argued.

“A jury should only take account of evidence led in the trial. Where there has been extensive reporting of prejudicial material that is not admissible as evidence, then whether the jury has had regard to press reporting becomes uncertain. That can form a basis for challenging a jury’s guilty verdict,” she said.

“One alternative to a jury trial is a trial by judge alone. There are a few examples of this happening in recent times, one of which was the Luke Lazarus rape trial. In rare cases, the whole prosecution can be thrown out on account of adverse publicity. The priest Michael Glennon appealed his child sex crime conviction all the way to the High Court on this basis. He ultimately failed, but it was a split decision.”

“Glennon’s case challenged an existing conviction by a jury; it would be more difficult to win this kind of claim at the outset of a trial, where the single judge option remains available. However, an accused person might argue that that only compounds the unfairness; they should be entitled to trial before a jury of their peers like anyone else, but the trial by media has made it impossible.”

Adding to Ms Marshall’s comments was Marque managing partner Michael Bradley, who said the popularity of programs like The Staircase and How to Make a Murderer has “undoubtedly inspired” the Australian media to get into their own cold case investigations.

“It’s compelling material, as The Teacher’s Pet amply demonstrates. So, we can expect a lot more of this, and there’s no shortage of material (the NSW Police’s Unsolved Murders squad has over 500 cases on its books alone),” he said.

“The ABC’s program on the Keli Lane case, Exposed, is another example of a media investigation intersecting with the criminal law process, in a different way (raising questions about whether a conviction was just).”

The public interest in criminal cases will drive the media to get more deeply engaged in its own investigations, potentially in parallel or even competition with the police, he continued.

But, ultimately, that can do a great deal of harm to an accused person’s prospects of a fair hearing, he posited.

“The media has a responsibility to keep this in mind, and to balance its desire to break a good story against the social benefit of co-operating with, and being careful not to undermine, the criminal justice process,” he noted.

“In some cases that may mean risking losing the scoop by handing the lead over to the cops. It should always mean thinking through the consequences before making the decision to go into print.”

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