Word: pogrund
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Disfavor turned to harassment in 1965, when Mail Reporter Benjamin Pogrund wrote a series of articles exposing brutality and unhygienic living conditions in South Africa's jails. Gandar editorially demanded an inquiry. Instead, the government set up perjury trials for the ex-prisoners who had been interviewed. Four were convicted, and served sentences of up to 18 months. Then, Pogrund and Gandar were arrested under a law that makes it a crime to publish information about prisons without taking "reasonable steps" to verify accuracy...
Last week, after taking more than a month to write a decision that required seven hours to read (with time out for two tea breaks), the judge delivered his verdict: guilty of failing to take "reasonable steps" to verify the stories. Pogrund's sentence was suspended; Gandar paid a $280 fine rather than spend three months in jail...
...witnesses were painting "too rosy a picture" of prison life. Strachan was sent back to jail and served 18 months. With the Mail's informants thus legally discredited, the government finally moved against Gandar, long a nettlesome critic, and against the reporter who wrote the original series, Benjamin Pogrund...
...information on prisons without taking "reasonable" steps to verify it. The onus of proof is on the accused. The government no longer denies the main thrust of the Mail's stories, since ample evidence of prison brutality is now on the record. Instead, the charges against Gandar and Pogrund are based on legalistic quibbles. For instance, the prosecution does not dispute that prisoners were tortured with electric shocks-only that the newspaper said the shocks were administered on orders from a prison officer and were an everyday occurrence...
...declared, had gone "well beyond what most newspapers would have considered adequate" in checking its facts. Not to have published the stories, he said, "would have been a dereliction of duty, a suppression of a matter of vital public concern." Fulfilling that duty could now cost Gandar and Pogrund, if they are convicted, a year in prison on each of two counts...