Advertisement
Guest User

quack

a guest
Apr 28th, 2016
57
0
Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 1.69 KB | None | 0 0
  1. The article I have chosen is Natasha Wallace, ‘A daughter’s agony, her family’s suffering’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July 2004  Paul Sheehan. Criminal cases involving sexual assault have received significant media attention over the past decade. In some cases this frenzied attention has led to undesirable results, such as in 2004 when the conviction of one of five men accused of gang rape, Tayyab Sheikh, was overturned in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and a new trial ordered. When sensationalistic coverage gives a jury access to inadmissible material, the jury’s ability to ignore this information may be put into doubt and thus the accused may not receive a fair trial. The judges said this was regrettable but ‘a conviction following an unfair trial is a conviction obtained at too high a price’. In other cases, the media’s influence on public opinion, law organisations and governments has resulted in changes that improve the treatment of victims of serious sexual assault crimes in court. Victims being forced to recount their experience over and over, and defence counsel badgering victims in cross examination to call their credibility into question, have been graphically portrayed by the media and have horrified the public and many in the legal profession. Frequently, however, the positive outcomes have been accompanied by less desirable ones, such as the rights of the accused being accorded a fairly low importance, and a readiness to exploit the prejudices of some segments of the public. In the 2004 Sydney gang rape trials, an ugly racist theme surfaced in some of the public rhetoric, focusing on the ethnicity of the rapists. The media can be an unreliable instrument of justice.
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement