Rigid Restriction in Britain

In the U.S. the possible conflict between a free press's right to report criminal proceedings and a defendant's right to an unprejudiced trial is still the subject of a lively debate. In Britain that conflict has already been resolved in favor of the defendant. Once a suspect has been arrested and charged with a crime, newspaper accounts are largely confined to testimony at his trial. Now the new Labor government has announced its intent to make the restrictions more rigid than ever.

Sipping Blood. The prospect can hardly be pleasing to Fleet Street; painful experience has long since taught British papers the wisdom of living within the rules. After the 1949 arrest of John George Haigh, who was accused of killing women and sipping goblets of their blood, the Daily Mirror chose to publish all the available gory details. The paper took care to disassociate its accounts of the VAMPIRE HORROR IN LONDON from the Haigh story, but no one was really deceived. Haigh was convicted and executed, but as a result of his suit against the Mirror, the newspaper was fined $40,000 and an editor went to jail.

The new proposal to strengthen the rules stems from a 1958 inquiry into the rights of criminal defendants, which the government dusted off without warning or explanation. If the proposal becomes law, Fleet Street will be prohibited from even reporting pretrial arraignments--the first court step in an accused man's progress to the dock. This fresh threat to journalistic freedom drew only a scattered response. The Guardian seconded the government's motion: "It is obvious that jurors who sit to hear a case in which evidence on one side has already been widely reported are not coming to court with a wholly open mind." The Times, on the other hand, demurred. To bar the press from arraignments, it said, would only prevent publication of a "fair and accurate summary of evidence"; it would not control the "distorted and half-understood gossip" that leaks from all such proceedings.

U.S. Press Bothered. The Times could have found its attitude supported by just about any paper in the U.S., where the press responds energetically to any suggestion of regimentation. Aware that state after state is trying to keep prosecutors, police and defense lawyers from talking to reporters, and bothered by the fact that Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse has introduced a press-restriction bill in Washington, the American Newspaper Publishers Association announced last week the formation of a Committee on Free Press and Fair Trial. Said Gene Robb, A.N.P.A. president and publisher of the Albany,

N.Y., Times-Union and Knickerbocker News: "The few instances where those rights appear to be in conflict should be resolved without any loss of our liberties."

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