Sebastian Hamilton fined for contempt over trial coverage

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Irish Daily Mail editor Sebastian Hamilton was fined €4,500 for contempt of court over coverage of the trial of two teenage boys for the murder of Ana Kriégel. He was given six weeks to pay. The newspaper’s publisher, Associated Newspapers (Ireland), was fined €25,000.

Hamilton had not pleaded guilty to contempt. The proceedings were reported on 8 July 2019.

The contempt proceedings followed an article published on 3 May 2019. Mr Justice Paul McDermott said court reporter Helen Bruce’s original copy was accurate, but a member of the editorial staff rewrote it to include material not given in evidence. He said Bruce bore no responsibility.

The judge said the misreporting created a real risk to the administration of justice and seriously disrupted the trial. He accepted there was no deliberate attempt to interfere with the administration of justice.

Mr Justice McDermott said Hamilton had left the office and was absent when decisions about the article were made. His direction that the reporter should rewrite court copy had been ignored. The judge described this as a systems failure for which Hamilton, as editor, was responsible.

The judge reduced Hamilton’s fine from €7,500 to €4,500 and the publisher’s fine from €30,000 to €25,000 to take mitigating factors into account.