The Supreme Court of Victoria dismissed the accused's application for broad suppression and takedown orders in respect of extensive adverse pre-trial publicity following the quashing of his murder conviction and the ordering of a retrial. The Court held that takedown orders were not 'necessary' — the applicable threshold — for four cumulative reasons: the negligible prospect of potential jurors inadvertently searching for archived material; the capacity of judicial directions during empanelment and trial to address prejudice; the futility of orders that could not reach substantially similar material hosted on overseas websites; and the evidence that media respondents had taken steps to remove material and now understood the sub judice constraints. As to prospective publication, the Court accepted that no new contemptuous publications were threatened or anticipated, though it expressed considerable concern about a podcast that had remained accessible for two months after the retrial was ordered, noting that fresh publication of such material would almost certainly constitute a serious sub judice contempt.
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