Do publication bans still work?
Though I'm not completely sure, I think that means that I'm breaking the law by providing these links: Remains of five victims found at property of alleged serial killer and 'Human Remains Have Been Discovered'. The AP story that those two articles are based on is available on at least a dozen other sites (including several in the UK).
Clearly, in the Pickton case, the publication ban is having a limited impact. Though Canadian media aren't reporting details of the hearing, at least one US paper that's distributed in Vancouver has the story. It's also on American web sites, television and radio stations. In other words, the details are widely available in Canada, but not from Canadian media. So the publication ban only serves to put Canadian media at a competitive disadvantage.
More interesting, however, is the B.C. Attorney General's statement that "it may be time to consider whether publication bans actually work in a world dominated by the Internet and global communications." The effectiveness of a publication ban hinges on a traditional few-to-many model of media. Though that model still reigns (at least here--something like 70% of Albertans get their news during the first 10 minutes of the evening newscast), it's being challenged by independent reporters, email, blogs, moblogging, and who knows what next.
So the court has a choice: hold the entire preliminary hearing in camera (requested by Pickton's lawyers and rejected by the judge), or just deal with the fact that if there's sufficient demand the information will leak out. (Information always leaks out, and an eager person can easily unearth most details from a trial. But since the rise of the web, a publication ban is more like a coarse sieve than a dam; it will only stop the biggest clods from getting to the information.)
Still, this case presents something of a dilemma. If the jury pool is tainted and Pickton can't get a fair trial, he goes free. As much as we want our justice system to be open and transparent, what do we do when transparency itself can lead to injustice? The court has no real ability to enforce the publication ban, even if there's a plausible reason for doing so. (It's interesting to consider what impact the web, in its current form, would have had on the publication ban surrounding the Karla Homolka trial.)
The genie's out of the bottle, anyway.
