EXTREMELY IMPORTANT - Discussion of Court Cases and Comtempt of Court

Sparks

Hey everyone, something has come down from the Boards.ie admins that affects this forum rather directly with regards to the upcoming high court cases on licencing:

You may have seen recently that a court case in Clare regarding a GP who's accused of defrauding families collapsed because of something published in the Times and the Examiner. They're likely to have to foot the bill for the entire trial - the judge hasn't decided but concedes that they didn't act out of malice and that as it was unintentional, it's Technical Contempt.

This is something we have, I believe, discussed before, but with this recent news and an emerging trend of defence teams increasingly looking for these sorts of issues to collapse trials, we are making it clear and stated policy of Boards.ie that you can no longer discuss an active/sitting court case as pretty much any sort of commentary on the issue can be classified as contempt. Offering opinion on the innocence or guilt of the parties involved for example is a definite no-no.

This is simply too big a risk to determine where the "safe" levels of discussion are, so it's easier to make a blanket ban on current case discussion.

This comes from the top - the directors of the company can be jailed for contempt on the whims of a judge who feels they deserve it and given the Irish Legal System's complete inability to work with (never mind understand) the Internet and all that it entails, I'd really rather not have to try and talk to DeVore at visiting hours in the 'Joy

So effective immediately, current court cases are a no-no. This, I'm afraid folks, isn't up for debate. We don't like "issuing" rules like this without some manner of discussion but I'm afraid that's not an option in this case.

Thank you for your time.

There are some questions still to be answered, and the boards.ie head office is working with Legal to figure out some of those questions (such as, at what point does the case officially start and at what point is it officially over - ie. do we need to await any appeals before talking about the judgement; can we talk about the impact of a hypothetical outcome without referring to the innards of the case itself; what are the jurisdictional limits to this; and so on).

Until they do and we can get finer-grained rules though, we're banning any and all discussion of any and all ongoing cases. For us that basicly means that the three test cases in the High Court on licencing, the 180 JR cases coming after them, and any upcoming DC licencing cases are now all off-limits, at least until we hear back from Legal.

Sorry about this folks, but given that the boards.ie team has given us this place gratis over the last few years, it'd be a fairly dickish payback for one of us to land them in the 'Joy over a comment on an ongoing case.

More updates will get posted on this thread as they come in.

Sparks

Just to give a rough timeframe by the way, we're expecting to hear clarification on this in a week or two.