Lately, while I happened to be leafing through an old newspaper from the early 1990s, I encountered a couple of articles that set me thinking. These articles were related to young people accused of being in possession of cannabis.

A joint or two, for personal use, nothing extraordinary. Certainly, they weren’t drug barons making money by selling death.

The accompanying photos showed their full faces, their names published underneath. I tried to follow up what happened to them but there was no further news about these individuals, at least in the newspapers of the following three years.

Today, their crime no longer exists. One can safely enjoy a few puffs from a joint, in solitude or with friends, without the fear of being branded as a criminal (with all the repercussions that follow) if caught by the long arm of the law.

Yet, back then, these young people had their futures jeopardised, perhaps they lost their jobs, their police conduct tarnished. All of Malta and Gozo knew them to be ‘drug users’, a euphemism for being degenerate back then when the so-called ‘war on drugs’ was on top of the national agenda.

In reality, it was a war on individuals, especially young people, particularly those hailing from the then still predominantly blue-collared working classes.

Now that drug use has become equally – or perhaps more – widespread among the professional classes (especially the habitual use of cocaine), the war on drugs has been very much sidelined. But that’s a matter begging an article for itself.

This little accidental research of mine happened in parallel with the much talked about case of a priest arraigned on the charge of misappropriation of funds.

We all got to know his name, even if we’ve never been regulars at the Marsaxlokk parish church, and his photos, assumingly taken from his Facebook page – enjoying a glass of wine, riding quite a fine BMW bike – have been all over the media.

The hype around this case roused by the staunch defence of their pastor by parishioners, the sensationalist, hugely insensitive reporting by the media (not just towards the accused but also towards the Marsaxlokk community) and the public court of Facebook where any Tom, Dick and Harry feels he owns the right to don the garbs of prosecutor and judge, have raised a couple of pertinent ethical questions about reporting from court.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, it has been a principle of criminal law that the accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. If that still holds (which, to my knowledge, it still does), then why are the accused paraded in public as if they are guilty before they even set foot in court?

Is it really in the public interest that their names are published, their faces shown, that every detail of their personal life is exposed to a gossip-hungry populace?

Is it the public interest that is being served or the interest of the public gaze, which translates in clicks and views and hashtags, all of which eventually yield money to a financially ailing industry?

It should be crystal clear that what serves public interest is not what gratifies the public gaze- Aleks Farrugia

One might argue that, for example, in the case of Daphne’s murder, it is definitely in the public interest that her presumed killers be known to the public, even if they are pending trial. That I find to be a very sound argument: firstly because of the rupture it created in Maltese society (there will never be a return to a pre-Daphne’s murder state of being in Maltese society); and, secondly, since Daphne’s murder has shaken Maltese society to its core, it is in the public interest that the course of justice be under the public eye so that a process of closure and healing might eventually commence.

In this case, the attention of the public towards what’s happening in court is so intense that it won’t get past anyone if any of the accused is absolved of the crime and found to be innocent.

Unlike what happened to those young people arraigned for possessing a joint or two back in the 1990s. Unlike what’s likely to happen when the hullabaloo about the bike-loving priest from Marsaxlokk settles down and perhaps (who knows!) found not guilty. Unlike what happens to many of those accused, paraded and then acquitted.

Despite their innocence, they keep carrying a burden of guilt that isn’t theirs, simply because, by the time they were acquitted, the show had turned its lights elsewhere.

I remember Marica, a student of mine, who wrote her dissertation interviewing such people, their lives forever marked by a crime they didn’t commit, forever branded by society despite their acquittal. It made a heart-wrenching read indeed. Perhaps her work ought to be published, for the sake of public awareness and for the sake of those who till now have remained voiceless at the periphery of society.

All this begs for some soul-searching when it comes to reporting from the law courts. The media must ask itself whether its reporting has public interest at heart but, before that, perhaps there should be more clarity about how public interest is defined.

It should be crystal clear that what serves public interest is not what gratifies the public gaze. That the latter is not a right but a vice, fuelled by a wildly liberal interpretation of what justice ought to be.

The point of departure towards understanding what public interest consists of is in the nature of the crime itself. Not every crime breaks the trust, cohesion and safety of the community in the same way. Not even the law makes such sweeping generalisations, so the law in itself should be an indicator.

Furthermore, there is the human consideration, the realisation that, behind every news report, there are human beings who have a life and have the right to live it without becoming the object of gossip and public judgement, if anything at least till they are found guilty and then only in proportion to the heinousness of their crime.

 Aleks Farrugia is a writer and historian.