Daily BrewJudge rejects excessive publication ban in Luka Magnotta’s prelim hearing
A preliminary hearing in the murder trial of Luka Rocco Magnotta will be viewed by the media and public, including the victim’s father, after a judge rejected a request to ban visitors from the courtroom.
The Canadian Press reports that Quebec court judge Lori-Renee Weitzman ruled on Tuesday that the public and media will be allowed inside the courtroom for the preliminary hearing.
Prelims are essentially pre-trials in which the Crown lays out their case. They receive an automatic publication ban when one is requested. But Magnotta's team had been seeking a stricter ban. Those stricter rules, including blocking the media from attending the preliminary hearing, were rejected.
[ Related: Judge says public can attend Magnotta's preliminary hearing ]
And perhaps rightfully so. The public already knows everything there is to know about Luka Magnotta. Mostly because that is the way Magnotta wanted it.
He created a massive web of details and information about himself online, and appeared in newspapers and television interviews well before he was notorious, in a seeming attempt to make himself famous.
He once publicly claimed and later denied that he was romantically connected Karla Homolka. This was during a time that he was a self-described male model, but before many others knew his name.
The allegations against Magnotta are similarly graphic. Victim Jun Lin was decapitated, an act purportedly captured on a video that was fed to the Internet. Pieces of his body were mailed to a school and the Ottawa offices of the Conservative and Liberal parties of Canada.
[ More Brew: Publication ban sought for Magnotta’s preliminary hearing ]
With the scar so graphic and so public, there is little reason to shield us now. The basic publication ban will be sufficient to ensure the public is not tainted to the evidence to be brought forward. Everything else has become public already.
Still, Magnotta's lawyer argued that potential jury members could be swayed by knowing too much about the preliminary hearing process. What colour of shirt did Magnotta wear? Did he smile or hunch over? Did he cry?
The National Post's Christie Blatchford summarizes the court's ability to find a jury in two words: Paul Bernardo.
The serial rapist and killer was the subject of years of non-stop press, or, as the judge who presided over the secret trial of Bernardo’s then-wife Karla Homolka once called it, “extraordinary media attention and sensational newspaper reporting.”
...
When jury selection began for Bernardo’s trial 22 months later, 1,000 potential jurors were summoned and two weeks booked for the picking.
They got seven jurors the first day. They got four the second. It was all over before they knew it. All the hand-wringing, hysteria and bizarre protections had been for nought: The jurors stepped up, listened to the judge and tried the case fairly, as they almost always do, just as they will for Luka Magnotta, the nonsense from his lawyer notwithstanding.
The public will hear about the Magnotta trial is great detail, and not because this extensive publication ban was rejected. We will hear about it because, at this point, there will be no choice but to hear about it. But that doesn’t mean an able jury cannot be found.
One will be found and the jurors will try the case fairly. It is in no one’s best interest for it to be done any other way.
