About 440 times a year, overwhelmingly in the District Court. How often is that exercised? Not too often. The courts have a discretion to suppress evidence or submissions. Sometimes facts (such as past convictions or contested evidence) can be suppressed, too. It’s not always (or not only) names that get suppressed. It seems likely that most of them are captured, though. Consequently, there probably aren’t as many different discretionary name suppressions as the above figures suggest.Īnother caveat: it’s not clear that these records pick up all the suppression orders made. In addition, final orders may be made after interim ones expire, so there’s some effective double-counting there. In general, this doesn’t include the suppression that arises by operation of the law (for child witnesses and victims of sex offences, for example) though it’s possible that sometimes a judge will make a formal order to underscore the importance of the suppression. The numbers have been fairly constant over the past five years during which these statistics have been recorded. There are about three times as many interim name suppression orders (five times as many in the High Court), but these are less significant since the media can eventually report them. Out of about 150,000 criminal cases each year, there are about 730 final name suppressions in the District Court and about 35 in the High Court. Is permanent name suppression given out like lollies? In short: no. Name suppression is the perennial hot issue. But in an admirably prompt response to my request for some statistical information, the Ministry of Justice compiled some data for me from their records. Just how much suppressing are the courts doing? In the past it’s been hard to tell, because statistics have been pretty patchy. Budget leak: Nats’ behaviour “entirely appropriate”?.When free speech creates disorder or hate.NZME admits it misled listeners by buying into Trump’s ridiculous election fraud claims – but BSA somehow finds broadcasting standards not breached.
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