Effects Of Media Trial On Court’s Proceedings

By A.S ADESHEILA, ESQ, ACArb

Medial trial can be said to be an impact of television and newspaper coverage on a person’s reputation by creating a widespread perception of guilt or innocence before the court verdict. This has been a trend in Nigeria but more recently to be a tool in the hands of those with some degree of affluence and who therefore afford to employ the services of the said coverage wanted by them. This situation is particularly popular in high profile cases where certain persons who feel hunted has the capacity to hire certain media houses to sell a story that they are being persecuted or on a table surrounded by powerful individuals or organization trying to damage the reputation of another individual or set of individuals. This procedure adopted is by using extraneous means to compromise information, disrupt due process and sometimes resulting in an unfair trial, it should be noted that if the accused facing trial does not have anything hidden, he/she would not run to the media to try to use the media to distort the allegation against him/her, the accused should leave his/her defence to the representative he/she has hired to do their job and allow the court to give its verdict based on the evidence before it and not trying to use the media to buy the conscience of the people, same way to the other side of the coin, if the powerful individual who has written a complainant against the suspect (s), upon which Complain the relevant agency has prefer a charge against the suspect should also leave the duty of prosecution to the agency and if they so willing to see to the matter hire a legal practitioner to watch brief on their behalf and not for them running to the media and using media to follow the court’s proceedings and imputing into the media their arsenal of trying to convict the suspect (s) even before the verdict of the court of competent jurisdiction.

Whenever there is a public interest case or a case shrouded in much controversy or one involving a high profile person(s), no doubt the public are so interested that they would want to know every little improvement made in the proceedings or evidence now available to the investigating and prosecuting team. It is most times, the penchant of the news channels and newspaper houses or whatever blogs to quench the thirst for the fact finding of the public, in doing this tedious assignment publishers publish to the public stories which consist of their own version of facts or such facts which are favourable to their hirers which most times are a distortion of the main facts with the sole aim of creating a bias in the minds of members of the public either against the accused person (s) or the Complaint and prosecuting agency. When members of the public are exposed to stories like that on the newspapers or blogs, they are very likely to form a perception based solely on those stories and articles reported, and by so doing form their own opinion on those stories about the accused person (s) regarding their guilt or innocence.

The courts in some jurisdiction in order to kick against media trial had to make certain hard decision regarding certain vital information. In Indian the case of Bhima-Koregaon quickly comes to mind, in that case few activists were arrested with an allegation of sharing links with Maoists by the Maharashtra police, the leads found for the case were leaked as a result of media trial. The 13 letters which were subject to investigation seem to give away vital information about the operations of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) got leaked to the reporters and created chaos in the entire proceedings of the case. The Bombay High Court had to come out to take a stand and it criticized the act of leaking the letters to the general public. As a result of this whole chaos, the court had to drop the letters to be considered as primary evidence before making any improvement in the case, at the end the letters were not submitted as evidence in the court. The court in that case held thus: “the use of electronic media by the investigating arm of the state which did the task of influencing public opinion during the pendency of the investigation completely subverts the fairness of the investigation.” The court went further to state that “Therefore, it cannot be denied that the intervention done by the media has so impact upon the evidence of a case and subsequently the entire proceedings of a case that is pending in the court for trial.” www.legalserviceindia.com/legal

Our judges are human though we agreed in the profession that they are not mere mortals, the media creates in the minds of the viewers or readers including but not limited to the judges the stories they want to sell out, it takes an enlightened and astute judge to not be swayed by the stories in public domain, sometimes it is even done to spite the judge either to be furious with the accused, prosecutors or him withdrawing from the case itself that is how damaging medial trial can go, the counsels in the case are not also exempted from the media trial, sometime the media focuses their attention on the counsel doing his legitimate job to coward them away from the case.

On this issue, I will end this write up by stating as follows; that the purpose of this article is not against our journalists nor trying to deter them from carrying out their duties rather it is to impress on our media houses the need to be the conscience of the people and in carrying out their duties, they act cautiously in order not to exceed or abuse the trial proceedings by convicting or declaring innocence of accused person before the court’s verdict is delivered. Journalists must keep within the limits of their duties by preventing themselves not to be used as vehicle to orchestrate certain individuals’ agenda and not to see themselves applying rule of man rather than rule of law.

A.S ADESHEILA, ESQ, ACArb.