FOR VICTIMS of violence and their families trials of those alleged to be responsible for their suffering are always going to hurt, to force the reliving of their agony in excruciating detail, often in the glare of publicity. For most there is then some comfort, some vindication for their loved one, in the beginnings of closure that the conviction of the culpable can bring. But for the devastated McAreaveys and Hartes, only the pain, deep, numbing, almost crippling pain. No closure.
For this family the hurt of the Mauritian justice system’s failure and that of its police to convict someone for Michaela’s murder has been compounded by the febrile media circus atmosphere surrounding the trial, not only pouring salt in the family’s wounds, but raising serious doubts about the fairness of the trial. And, most egregiously, by the intrusive and tasteless publication last weekend of pictures of the body and crime scene. The strong diplomatic protest by the Government to the Mauritius authorities is entirely appropriate.
There will always be a tension between, on the one hand, both the right of a free press to satisfy public curiosity and its duty to ensure fair judicial process by subjecting it to scrutiny, and, on the other, the public interest in ensuring that trials are not prejudiced or improperly influenced. Yet, as this paper’s correspondent Ruadhán Mac Cormaic noted, it was as if there were two trials under way simultaneously, one in courtroom 5, operating to rules not unlike those that apply here, and the other, “the biggest in Mauritian legal history”, in the ramshackle streets of Port Louis and the media, TV, radio, and press. In the latter case, local and international media, unconstrained by the court and normal rules, it seemed, sated a huge local appetite – it ran page-one stories on evidence before it had been put to the court, and on legal arguments from which the jury was supposed to be excluded. Lawyers from both sides gave interviews – running commentaries – as the trial proceeded, papers ran polls on the guilt of the accused ... And each of the trials inevitably played into the other.
The trial of two men became increasingly a sideshow. The judge had to warn jurors that they were not trying the nation, or its incompetent police. They were not to worry about the island’s reputation and tourist prospects. But it is difficult to imagine that they were not aware of and influenced to some degree by the ongoing theatre outside the courtroom. The McAreaveys and Hartes have not been well served by Mauritian justice.