By Sarah Lagan
Coventry Evening Telegraph reporter James McCarthy has had a
three-year gagging order successfully overturned, to name a school
caretaker jailed on child porn charges.
The Section 39 order imposed at Coventry Magistrates’ Court in 2003 served to protect the identity of Anthony O’Shea’s children.
The case then went to trial at Northampton Crown Court, where two judges upheld the order.
McCarthy argued against the order when the case was referred to Coventry Crown Court for sentencing.
McCarthy
argued: “Section 39s are put in place to protect children who are
victims of a crime, and O’Shea’s children were not involved, so they
wrongly imposed it on that count.
“And a section 39 order should
never be used to protect the identity of a defendant anyway. I couldn’t
believe it had been in place since 2003.”
The judge in the case, Judge Patrick Eccles QC, backed McCarthy.
He
said: “The interests of the free reporting of this case outweigh the
interests of the children for the reason that otherwise, in cases of
this nature, the more serious the offence, the stronger would be the
case for it never to be reported.”
O’Shea, 34, was jailed for five months and placed on the sex offenders’
register for seven years.
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