Name Suppression and Penal Populism

Abstract

Despite being a highly controversial issue, the power of courts to prohibit the publication of defendant identities, remains under-researched domestically and abroad. This thesis aims to create a foothold for criminology in the arena of name suppression laws, for both empirical and theoretical works to build upon. This objective is pursued through an extensive study of judicial rulings on name suppression applications, and their legislative development over recent history. The concept of penal populism is used to ground this investigation within a theoretical context. Using legal databases, 300 name suppression applications between 1985 and early 2018 were sampled in groups of 50 to capture judicial attitudes prevailing before and after legislative shifts in name suppression policy. These applications were coded using elements informed by a review of name suppression and penal populism literature, so that resulting trends may indicate whether penal populism has influenced the development and/or application of name suppression law in New Zealand. While resulting trends indicate that name suppression laws may have been influenced by a form of penal populism, it is also unlikely that the value-laden version proposed by John Pratt and other theorists, had such impact. Rather, the interaction between law and society was a multi-faceted collage of competing interests, not readily simplified into a competition between the elite and common-folk. This data has implications for both penal populism and name suppression, though available conclusions are restricted by the practical limitations of the research conducted.