What reporters can and cannot tell you about a criminal trial

Court stories often read as if written through a keyhole: charges reported without background, a defendant's history unmentioned, a second name conspicuously absent. Readers increasingly notice the gaps, and social media fills them, sometimes at the cost of collapsing the trial itself. The gaps are law, and the law is worth understanding before commenting on any live case.

The central rule is contempt of court. Once proceedings are active, which begins at arrest or charge, not at trial, publishing anything creating a substantial risk of serious prejudice to the case is a criminal offence. In practice that means previous convictions, confessions, speculation about guilt, and evidence a jury might never lawfully see all become unpublishable, however true. The logic is constitutional rather than squeamish: defendants are tried on the evidence presented in court, by jurors who have not been marinated in a pre-verdict. This is why coverage of a dramatic arrest goes suddenly quiet, and why the full story, the record, the pattern, the things police knew, pours out only after verdict. The restraint was the system working.

Contempt binds everyone, not just newspapers. A viral post naming what the jury cannot hear is the same offence committed by an amateur, and people have been prosecuted for exactly that, as have jurors who researched defendants online. Sharing someone else's contemptuous post republishes it.

Names the law removes

A second family of rules governs identity. Complainants in sexual offence cases have automatic lifelong anonymity from the moment of allegation, regardless of outcome, and the offence includes publishing details likely to identify them, a jigsaw that casual social media detail assembles easily. Children involved in proceedings, whether as defendants, witnesses or victims, are routinely protected by orders, which is why a case can be fully reported with one participant existing only as a legal ghost. Courts can add discretionary restrictions: postponing reporting of one trial to protect a linked one yet to be heard, which produces the strangest silences of all, verdicts that cannot be mentioned for months, then arrive in the news apparently from nowhere alongside the conclusion of a second case.

None of this makes courts secret. Open justice remains the default; reporters sit in court precisely so the public need not, and accredited journalists hold specific rights to attend even some hearings closed to others. The system's bet is that justice must be seen to be done, but seen accurately, at the right moment.

For readers the practical rules are short. The gap in the story is usually a restriction, not laziness. The confident thread naming names may be a live contempt. And the day after the verdict is when the reporting you wanted all along was legally waiting to be published.