Yea But those half humans shoot and stab and beat up, they don’t bomb.

Strange eh.

A certain Sunday newspaper reported on this http://www.sundayworld.com/columnists/index.php?aid=6789
IED’s cause more fear and also give the offender time to get away in good time. This has been going on for some time now as I have been saying and some criminals http://www.sundayworld.com/columnists/sw-irish-crime.php?aid=9312 seem to be willing to step up their campaign.

No you’re wrong. The reason you can’t comment on some stories is because there may be a court case that could be influenced by the media. That’s why. Now apologise to the nice people at the journal that you have wrongly accused.

I’d imagine because it’s an on going court case? There has been a few. It opens up journal.ie for liable accusations if wrong person convicted etc. I could be wrong though

When a courtcase is pending you can’t be seen to allow comments which could possibly affect the outcome of the case. I.e a jury reading some comments which afftect their decision. Might be an unlikely scenario, but what news site would leave themselves open to that?

I don’t believe that is the sole reason if someone from thejournal.ie will clarify I will indeed apologise.

Then Send them an email or drop them a line and stop filling up this space with removable comments.

Hi TGM – I understand your frustrations, but we walk a bit of a tightrope when it comes to stories dealing with court cases. Allow me to explain – and apologies, in advance, for the length of this comment.

First of all, TheJournal.ie runs a post-moderated comments system. This means that users are free to post comments as they wish, and we then remove them if they breach our house rules or pose a legal threat. This is by far the best way of facilitating an open and interesting debate between users. The only alternative would mean we’d need to pre-approve every comment before it’s published; this is a system that’s been tried by two major Irish newspapers before and ended up being abandoned because it was simply too much work, and stifled debate.

At the time of writing, we have a total of 664,140 comments published online. The site has been live for 25 months, give or take a few days – this is the equivalent of 35.7 comments per hour, every hour since the site went live. I think you’ll agree that asking a moderator to pre-approve so many comments is a total non-runner and it would hamper any sense of community or discussion on our articles.

Legally, however, TheJournal.ie (or, specfically, its publisher Journal Media Ltd) is the ‘publisher’ of all content on this website. This includes the comments posted underneath stories, even though these are usually posted by a user (i.e. you) and not by Journal Media’s own employees (i.e. me). This means that if there’s any legal issues with a story I write, it’s Journal Media (and not me) who carries the can. It also means that if there’s legal issues with a comment, it’s Journal Media (and not you) who has to deal with responsibilities.

The problem with comments in legal cases is that they can prejudice the thoughts of a jury (or even the judge), and result in the total collapse of a trial. There are plenty of examples, both in Ireland and abroad, where trials have collapsed simply because public comments about the suspects means a juror can’t be expected to reach a fair decision, based solely on the evidence presented in the courtroom. Here’s one Irish example from earlier this year – http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0723/newspapers-to-learn-cost-of-collapsing-trial.html – in which a reporter accidentally revealed details which were not discussed in front of the jury, and therefore inadmissible. Not only did the trial collapse, but the papers had to share a bill of about €540,000 for their error. A similar problem in our case could bankrupt us.

Our post-moderated system comes at a price. If someone was to leave a comment on a piece about a court case, it could (possibly) be hours before it was spotted and removed. Those hours are too precious and by the time we can act, it could be too late. The only way in which we can safeguard ourselves – and make sure that we can keep providing the services we do – is to pre-emptively close comments on any piece involving matters before the courts.

Fair enough Gavin, I apologise