Adjudication No. 1153 (January 2002)

The Press Council has unreservedly and unanimously condemned publication by the (Adelaide) Sunday Mail of a series of articles and pictures which described a 1994 murder by drowning of a woman, and a recent attempt by a group of South Australian academics, senior lawyers and scientists to re-create and film it.

The Council is reassured to note that the paper issued a prompt apology to its readers and the murder victim's family, and that it acknowledged their outrage by publishing two pages of letters, all of them critical of the coverage.

However, publication of the material was, in the Council's view, a serious lapse of editorial judgment and should never have occurred in the first place.

The material was intended to examine doubts surrounding forensic investigation procedures in South Australia, and the resulting evidence given to courts. Its particular focus was a former Chief Forensic Pathologist, Dr Colin Manock. However, most of its five component articles, and five images taken from a videotape of the simulated drowning, dealt directly with the murder and with what was purported to be a re-enactment of the event 7 years later.

Dr Manock did not undertake the autopsy on the victim in this case, although he gave evidence at the trial of the man later convicted of the crime.

A substantial part of the text cited evidence about the alleged murder method presented at the trial. A colour picture covering half the paper's front page, under the headline Bath Murder Video, showed a struggling model with her face being forced under water in a bath.

It was this emphasis that led to the material becoming the subject of complaint to the Press Council by Joanne Cheney, the murder victim's mother, and by more than 20 other readers. The complaints criticised several aspects of the coverage, including:

• its sensationalism and gross insensitivity to the victim's family;
• its potential impact on children;
• the risk it might generate of "copycat" activities; and
• its timing (the material was published just over one week before Christmas).

The Press Council accepts that the reliability of forensic evidence in courts is a matter of major public interest. However, it was clearly inappropriate to base most of an investigative report on this issue on a rehearsal of detailed evidence presented at one particular trial, and on the antics of the persons who commissioned and videotaped the murder "re-enactment".

The Sunday Mail acknowledged that the coverage had, in its own words, "crossed the boundary". Its recognition of its error was reflected in the publication, in the following edition, of a page 2 three-paragraph apology to readers and to the Cheney family, and of 49 letters to the editor, protesting about various aspects of the coverage.

The Press Council urges Australian newspapers to reject the kind of gratuitous portrayal of violence, compounded by failure to consider the sensitivities of relatives, that generated these complaints.

return to
Adjudication index

[ return to top ]

Documents with the icon require the Acrobat Reader, a Free Utility from Adobe. Click here for more information.