The High Court has refused Niall Byrne’s application for orders requiring the Director of Public Prosecutions to search the internet for material about his case and seek its removal before his retrial.
Mr Justice Charleton ruled on 11 November 2010 that the DPP had no duty to sweep the internet for references to an accused person. He found that the publicity cited by Byrne did not suggest or imply that he was guilty and came nowhere near the threshold for a risk of an unfair trial.
Byrne faced kidnapping and robbery charges arising from a Securicor van robbery in March 2005. At an earlier trial, a jury convicted three men but could not agree verdicts for Byrne and another accused. The judgment says the three convicted men were later sentenced to 25 years in prison. Byrne’s application concerned a possible retrial; it did not determine the criminal charges against him.
The judge recounted two incidents during the earlier trial when material was removed after the trial judge intervened: newspaper website reports about bail hearings, and a radio programme broadcast during the trial. The jury had been unaware of the radio programme, according to the judgment.
Byrne argued that older reports and commentary could remain accessible online and might prejudice a new jury. The High Court examined examples of coverage from around the crime, the trial and the sentencing. It said those reports did not identify Byrne as responsible for the crime. Some coverage discussed possible assistance from within Securicor, but the judge said that did not establish anything about Byrne.
The court applied the test of whether publicity created a real and substantial risk of an unfair trial that could not be addressed by the trial judge’s rulings and directions. It held that the material in this case did not meet that test. The judge said decisions about warnings and directions to a jury at any retrial belonged to the trial judge.
The application was refused. The ruling did not order the removal of online material or decide what directions would be given at a retrial.