The Michaelmas law term opened on Monday, with upcoming cases that will almost certainly dominate the news agenda. Louth man Robert O’Connor will stand trial in the Central Criminal Court accused of murdering three members of his family. Riad Bouchaker, convicted in July of the attempted murder of three children at Parnell Square, will be sentenced next week. Daniel Kinahan appeared via video-link before the Special Criminal Court on Monday.
Readers following these cases may notice how the coverage rarely strays from straight reportage. Before anyone is charged, an Irish journalist’s main legal constraint is defamation. Once a charge is laid, the far stricter law of contempt takes over. Reporting is then largely confined to what is said in open court. Previous convictions, background colour, speculation about motive and anything implying guilt or innocence must wait for a verdict. In rape and sexual assault cases, the complainant is entitled to lifelong anonymity, and the accused cannot be named unless convicted.
Media organisations do not always accept the manner in which these limits are applied and challenge them, sometimes successfully. But the penalties for getting it wrong can also be heavy. In 2019, the publisher of the Irish Independent was fined €111,000 after an article published mid-trial caused a rape case to collapse.
Much of the public has little idea these rules exist, and reporters covering big trials grow used to accusations of timidity or cover-ups. Further confusion can be caused by coverage of cases in different jurisdictions. In Northern Ireland, a man charged with rape can be named, which is why former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson was identified long before his conviction this summer. South of the Border, he could not have been.
Farther afield, when Dublin man Lorcan Murphy was convicted in July of murdering US nurse Mackenzie Michalski in Budapest, the Hungarian practice of shielding the identities of accused and convicted people meant he went unnamed for some time in Irish reports.
We are witnessing a vivid demonstration across the Atlantic of what can happen when few of these protections apply.
In October 2024, a Cornell University student went to a party at the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca, New York. Weeks later, she told campus police she had been sexually assaulted by several fraternity members after being given alcohol and ketamine. The local district attorney declined to prosecute, saying her sworn account described the encounters as consensual. The university disciplined a number of students. Last month the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, sued seven men, the university and others. Lawyers for the men have denied wrongdoing. The DA promptly reopened the case before New York governor Kathy Hochul removed him and appointed state attorney general Letitia James as special prosecutor.
What followed has been trial by everyone. Because the men are named in the lawsuit, their names and photographs are everywhere. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a potential candidate at the next presidential election, told an audience the woman had been gang-raped for hours, as though it were fact. Hollywood actors demanded arrests. Donald Trump said whoever James investigated would not be treated fairly. Websites sprang up to name and shame the seven, and the student newspaper opened an editorial by listing them, after which its own editors were doxed in turn. A commentator set out to unmask Jane Doe, prompting social media users to declare en masse that they were her. Leaked statements, texts and transcripts continue to surface daily, each seized on by one camp or the other.
All of this is made worse by the dysfunction of US politics. Legislators have abdicated responsibility, leaving the rules on contested issues to swing wildly with each administration. Into that vacuum have stepped an increasingly politicised judiciary and elected prosecutors for whom high-profile cases double as campaign messages. Hochul is seeking re-election next month. James is one of Trump’s most prominent adversaries. It would be hard to argue that either the accuser or the accused has been well served during this process.
Ireland is largely free of such pressures, although the system has sometimes struggled with the challenges posed by new media technologies. In the early years of digital publishing, judges were faced with the fact that old reports were suddenly a click away. During a 2009 criminal trial, the judge ordered newspapers to remove archived reports from their websites. When one accused asked the High Court to make the DPP scrub the internet of references to him, Judge Peter Charleton refused, holding that clear directions to juries were the proper safeguard. That view has largely prevailed, and jurors are now told, in blunt terms, not to search online. Whether all of them comply is another matter.
[ How Cornell University punished seven men accused of sexual assaultOpens in new window ]
The focus has since shifted to individual users and the platforms they post on. Several people received suspended sentences for posting images of the boys convicted of murdering Ana Kriégel, and a woman in Co Down awaits sentence for a post likely to identify one of Donaldson’s victims.
Meanwhile, crime journalism has become one of the fastest-growing corners of digital media, from established players such as CrimeWorld, launched last year to replace the Sunday World’s website, to a crowded field of podcasters and content creators with no lawyer on call. Add in the new challenge of AI tools that can assemble a profile of any defendant in seconds. The ground will not stop shifting, but the principle that people are tried on the evidence in court, and nowhere else, remains worth fighting for.
