KEY POINTS:
A decision on the online name suppression of the two men arrested for the murder of 14 year-old John Hapeta is set to be released next week.
Judge David Harvey took the unprecedented step of suppressing the names of the accused in online publications only, while allowing daily newspapers, television news bulletins and radio bulletins to broadcast the names on August 25.
However his ruling did not allow media organisations, including nzherald.co.nz, to publish articles which included the names of the accused.
The suppression order has since been breached by online forums and blogs.
This morning a joint application was heard on behalf of APN, Fairfax, TVNZ, MediaWorks, Radio New Zealand and the New Zealand Press Association to have the suppression lifted.
The lawyer for the media organisations, Bruce Gray QC, said that the case went to open justice and the role of the media to report cases for members of the public not able to attend court.
Mr Gray said this was balanced by the need for a fair trial but said if the court was concerned about the possibility of a juror using an internet search engine to find a historic news article and potentially contaminating a case, then the issue was one of jury education.
Lawyer for one of the accused, Shane Tait, said jury contamination was more of a possibility in low profile cases because less information is available in the media prior to the trial and jury members make more of an effort to find it.
A decision from Judge Harvey is likely to be handed down next Friday.
- NZHERALD STAFF
