IPSO upholds Oliver Bramwell complaint over Express & Star court report

The article, which was headlined “Cavalry trooper guilty of supplying drug that cost life of Wolverhampton best friend”, reported that the complainant had been convicted of supplying cocaine to a friend.

The complainant said that the article had been published three and a half hours before the jury returned a unanimous verdict that he was not guilty. He said that the article was therefore entirely inaccurate. The complainant said that the article was seen by a number of people, and that even after it was removed from the newspaper’s website, it appeared in Google search results with the inaccurate headline for over a week.

The newspaper accepted that the article was inaccurate. It explained that a “holding piece” written ahead of the jury’s verdict had been accidentally published onto the site in a very unfortunate human error. It said that the correct version of the article, stating that the defendant had been cleared, was published as the lead story on the homepage, on the same day.

IPSO’s Complaints Committee found that publication of a court report before the jury had reached its verdict, wrongly reporting that a defendant had been convicted of criminal offence, was a serious failure. The article had been published online by accident. However, this did not reduce the seriousness of the breach, indeed it underlined the critical importance of establishing and implementing systems that acknowledge and address the risk of such an event. The complaint was upheld as a breach of Clause 1 (i).

The Committee welcomed the steps the newspaper took to address the error, but the complaint was upheld as a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

The Committee required publication of this ruling as remedial action for the breach.