Adam Cooper, court reporter from The Age on suppression orders and the OPP (Office of Public Prosecutions) vs the media: a contempt of court case.
Many media outlets have reported in recent years on Victoria being the suppression order capital of Australia, but few realise that some Victorian news outlets are still waiting to hear if they will be punished over the publication of details from Cardinal George Pell’s case.
An article in The Age in 2019 revealed there had been well over 400 suppression orders in Victoria although this was a conservative figure of only those cases that the courts had disclosed to the media.
The most high-profile suppression order issued in recent times was in December 2018 when Cardinal George Pell was on trial (and later acquitted) for allegedly molesting two choirboys in the mid 1990s.
(The High Court on April 7, 2020 unanimously decided to uphold Cardinal George Pell’s appeal and overturned his convictions of five charges. This was on the grounds of the evidence not being able to support a guilty verdict.)
Adam Cooper, court reporter for The Age was one of many journalists whose work was restricted by the suppression order.
Cooper’s then-editor, Alex Lavelle considered Pell’s case was of “high-public interest” and “wanted to publish stories about it without breaching the suppression order”.
But the Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP) had placed contempt of court charges against news outlets such as The Age, The Geelong Advertiser and The Herald & Weekly Times back in April 2019.
Adam Cooper, court reporter for The Age. Photo supplied.
“His [Cardinal George Pell’s] name was strictly off-limits,” Cooper said.
“I distinctly remember one of the senior editors putting out an internal office memo reminding us to not go on to Twitter and other social media to talk about the case.”
A contributing columnist for the newspaper, who wasn’t in the newsroom every day, had written about Cardinal George Pell in an unrelated matter.
“Luckily it was picked up and not published,” Cooper said.
Cooper, along with his colleagues, had to refrain from writing publicly about Pell’s guilty verdict for just over two months because the Cardinal was facing further charges.
County Court chief judge Peter Kidd, who imposed the suppression order on media outlets, “wanted to ensure the jury in the subsequent trial wasn’t prejudiced in any way”.
“The suppression order was ultimately revoked or taken down when the proposed second trial was effectively aborted,” Cooper said.
During the period when Cooper couldn’t report the guilty verdict, he and his news editor liaised and worked on the stories they would later publish in February 2019.
“The stories would never be put in a publicly or easily-accessible file or anything like that at work,” Cooper said. “I kept them on my computer and I think I would just email my news editor at the time and show her what I was working on.”
As with any court case, when reporting, Cooper said “accuracy is paramount”.
But he did admit that reporting on trials like Cardinal Pell’s can sometimes can be difficult but at others also simple.
On February 21, all the media companies who breached the suppression order around the case pleaded guilty to contempt by breaching a suppression order.
However, Supreme Court judge John Dixon has yet to issue his verdict in the matter.
Photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales) on Visualhunt.com
