Andrea Vance: How the courts and coroners are memory-holing crime
Friday, 24 July 2026
Warning - this opinion piece contains discussion of suicide.
Andrea Vance is national affairs editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.
OPINION: Welcome to the peculiar universe of New Zealand’s legal establishment ‒ where the right to know finds itself in the dock.
Following the high-profile acquittal of Philip Polkinghorne, an upcoming inquest was scheduled for next month to examine the death of his wife, Pauline Hanna.
The trial gripped the nation. Millions ‒ here and abroad ‒ followed every twist through news stories, podcasts and documentaries centred around one question: did she take her own life or was she murdered?
Yet, in a decision delivered on Tuesday, Chief Coroner Judge Anna Tutton slammed the door shut on reality.
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Rejecting applications from media outlets for statutory exemptions to report the inquest fully, Tutton ruled that reporters cannot describe the method of death or report it as a suicide prior to a formal finding.
Why? Because, under coronial logic, repeating details already broadcast to the entire nation for years presents an “undue risk” of “contagion” – the psychological theory that media coverage can trigger copycat suicides.
In a vacuum, suicide prevention guidelines make sense.
But in this case, the horse hasn't just bolted from the barn; it’s starring in a three-part TV documentary and a best-selling book.
The legal system now expects journalists to cover a high-profile public inquiry while pretending the entire country has total amnesia.
I wish I could tell you this was a blip or a one-off coronial quirk.
Sadly, it is the latest – and possibly the most absurd yet ‒ example of a broader drift towards secrecy in the justice system.
The contrast with our political debate is striking. On one hand, we have a political culture that thrives on publicising crime. Politicians routinely invoke gangs, ram raids and violent offenders to justify their tougher laws.
At the same time, the justice system frequently concludes that accurate reporting of court proceedings is somehow too dangerous for the public to see.
What was once intended as narrow, exceptional protection has evolved into an entrenched culture of censorship.
New Zealand's suppression laws are unusual because of how readily ‒ and how extensively ‒ they are used.
In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees that mugshots, arrest records, and court filings enter the public domain almost instantly. US media frequently broadcasts emergency services calls, considered public records under freedom of information laws. Here, Police Commissioner Richard Chambers threatened Stuff with the possibility of prosecution for publishing police radio communications from the night of fugitive Tom Phillips’ death. Stuff remained confident that it didn’t breach any laws.
In the United Kingdom and Australia, open justice remains a strict baseline; adult defendants are named as a matter of course, and name suppression is a rarity reserved for exceptional security threats or child victims. The British tabloid press froth over stories about super injunctions.
Under Section 200 of the Criminal Procedure Act, we have normalised a level of defendant anonymity that the press and public in London, Washington, or Sydney would not tolerate.
It’s so routine that only when high-profile cases blow up internationally, like the murder of British backpacker Grace Millane, is the futility of this uniquely Kiwi bubble debated.
While domestic newsrooms were gagged, media in London broadcast the killer’s name to the planet. Thousands of New Zealanders discovered his identity within seconds via Google autocomplete and Reddit.
Name suppression is something the news media has long accepted. It’s expensive and draining to challenge and over time has become the default rather than the exception. But now the courts have gone one step further: ordering the internet to forget.
The turning point came with Exley v NZME, a case that changed the boundaries of open justice.
Damon Exley was a high-risk offender facing trial for serious offences committed while on the run from prison. Before his case went to trial, his legal team sought orders requiring the removal of online news articles detailing his past criminal history and character.
Traditionally, when courts were asked to restrict or remove publication, judges weighed competing principles: a defendant’s right to a fair trial against the public’s right to freedom of expression and open justice.
In Exley, the Supreme Court held that the former took priority.
The court ruled that because the right to a fair trial is absolute, it is not to be balanced against other rights like freedom of expression when deciding on a takedown order.
The court accepted a difficult reality of the internet age: some jurors may ignore instructions and search for information about defendants. Its solution was to empower courts to temporarily remove material before it could be seen. To ensure the power was not overly broad, it specified that takedown orders must strictly target specific, identified URLs rather than broad or sweeping categories of content.
By the time the ruling was delivered, Exley had already been tried and convicted.
But the judgment remained, creating a legal precedent to remove information from public view.
That opened the floodgates. A deluge of takedown demands landed in media inboxes across the country.
Editors and in-house lawyers now spend countless hours processing notices to unpublish, redact, and de-index verified reporting - often under tight, court-imposed deadlines and the threat of contempt.
Because there is no central public registry of these orders, tracking what needs to come down and what can eventually be republished is a Kafka-esque nightmare. Because newsrooms are operating with skeletal budgets almost every temporary takedown order becomes a permanent deletion from the public record.
Nowhere was this more farcical than in the wake of the quashing of David Tamihere’s murder convictions. News outlets were sent formal demands asking newsrooms to proactively go digging through their own archives to locate and delete historical coverage, explicitly foreshadowing future requests to erase reporting from the original 1990 trial.
Pause and reflect on what that actually means: defence lawyers are now demanding that newsrooms retroactively scrub 35-year-old journalism from the national record of one of the most famous legal cases in New Zealand history.
This is not isolated to courtrooms.
Before police release operational details about an incident or crime to the press, journalists must now provide signed, written consent in a privacy waiver from the victim or witnesses.
It is a policy of self-serving convenience. Public interest journalism does not – and must not – hinge on whether an individual feels comfortable signing a form.
A victim’s understandable desire for privacy cannot, by itself, erase the public’s right to know when events involve serious questions of accountability, public safety or the exercise of power. By outsourcing the public interest test to victim consent, police have created a veto power that can shield them from questions.
Scrubbing the internet in 2026 is an exercise in futility. Forcing local news outlets to unpublish verified reporting does nothing to eliminate offshore commentary, social media leaks, or AI search summaries. It only serves to silence ethical, professional journalists while surrendering narrative control to anonymous Reddit accounts and unverified online rumour mills.
Sure, if we scrub the news archives, suppress the defendant's name, and bury facts under a non-publication order, we can curate a tidier, gentler reality.
It is a noble impulse, perhaps ‒ born of a desire not to overly punish people or cause undue distress.
But you can’t protect a community by keeping them in the dark. And you cannot shield people from the truth of their own actions. Part of true accountability is acknowledging what you did wrong. And part of a functional justice system is a centuries-old rule: justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
More importantly, no one voted for this. New Zealanders never had a public debate, a conscience vote, or a referendum on converting our open legal system into an Orwellian memory hole. True to form, it was decided for us behind closed doors.
Where to get help
1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 to talk to a trained counsellor.
Anxiety New Zealand 0800 ANXIETY (0800 269 4389)
Depression.org.nz 0800 111 757 or text 4202
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In a life-threatening situation, call 111.