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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

well, let's see what it once said at that URL... oh dear.

"A 21-year-old woman said Tarik Sansal raped her in the apartment's bathroom before 2 A.M. yesterday, the police said. Mr. Sansal was charged with first-degree forcible rape. The incident occurred in the apartment of Englebert Theuermann, a first secretary of the Austrian Mission to the United Nations..."

"Addendum: March 18, 2008, Tuesday. The Times did not report on subsequent developments. Tarik Sansal has a certificate of disposition by the Criminal Court of the City of New York, saying that the case against him was dismissed and sealed on June 5, 1997."

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Publishing the names of suspects and accused is just a bad practice.

The court of public opinion knows no presumption of innocence and can ruin the life of someone acquitted easily.

If they have to name the name they should wait until after conviction.

That's how it's done in Norway and a bunch of other European countries, though the media usually don't even name convicted people unless there's major reasons/interest.

Also interesting, and quite sad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQSPBQjaWhI

The way it’s been explained to me is that if a journalist is going to name an accused, they should follow the case and publish the outcome as well.

For minor things, that’s not worth their time so they won’t name them.

Not a 100% practice, but I guess that’s what they teach in school.

The public opinion is a court that almost never acquits and that only serves life-term sentences

Yes, but secret trials don’t have a great history either. At its best, the media can prevent miscarriages of justice and make sure the government follows proper procedure.

There's a wide range between secret trials and not publishing peoples name in national media.

An approach used in many contexts is to make the information accessible but put limitations on publication whether permanently or only until a conviction is made, so that people with an interest in a case can investigate while recognising mistakes are made.

[another approach is various levels of barriers to make access inconvenient, e.g. forcing you to go to an office to look up records rather than making them easily searchable; or for tax information in Norway: the tax information is public, but unless you're media - who get a copy - your name will be accessible to the person you looked up]

America collectively has a pretty short attention span.

That would be fair for radio or such.

In the internet age it can heavily damage or ruin things like your job and dating prospects permanently.

I dunno, it's tricky. Should it really be unlawful to report on the suspects identity if the government doesn't reveal the name of a suspect but the journalist(s) are able to figure it out by interviewing witnesses? Also tricky needle to thread habeas corpus while trying to protect the accused.

The incorrect reporting and update is newsworthy; but the article as it existed is problematic to have as a primary source on a search result.

There should be some way of annotating the contents are deprecated and referencing another hyperlink which explains the currently known facts. This link might be to a court case for an authoritative result of non-conviction / assumed innocence.

What is incorrect about the reporting? And why should the contents be considered deprecated? A sealed court case is not linkable.

The existence of a sealed court case doesn't mean that there's been justice, either, particularly where international diplomats have been involved.

The reporting isn't incorrect though? They shoudln'tve revealed his name, but he did have an accusation against him.

It's incorrect in the sense of the summary or what someone who only saw the initial version might draw as a conclusion. Further the update mentions this initial version was _historically_ (Edit: from sometime after publication in 1996 and not updated until 2008!!!) left online and indexed by search engines well past when followups should have updated it with conclusions about that case.

Hence it is 'incorrect' to present this article in a cursory search result, but it is correct to produce it as a link in relation to more specific searches, or better, to instead of this page, any designated URL link when a hit would point to this page.

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