News Jaya

Why give him name suppression?

Yesterday, police were on the lookout for Vanessa Pickering, who disappeared with a man whom we cannot name, but yesterday his name was all over the papers. The man appeared in court today and got interim name suppression. Pickering’s body was found today.

Many media reports have been written about this case since Pickering went missing on Monday. Most of the ones on Stuff are catalogued on a page which you can access by searching "Vanessa Pickering", but every single story has had their links changed to this story. All had one line summaries to the story and one even had the suppressed man's name - which begs the question, why change the links when the name is identifiable from the one or two line description?

But on this 3News story Christchurch man gets name suppression there’s a helpful list of related articles in the sidebar, which gives the man’s name.

I have nothing against interim name suppression in some cases, but this case isn’t one of them, particularly given his previous convictions.