Word: prisons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...behind Continental, a lot of the racketmen were behind Continental, they were afraid of being exposed, cause they were really cheating on the take of money out there, they were taking in millions a year, millions and millions, and weren't declaring all the money, and rather than face prison they blew up the whole thing, and set fire to the thing, and a couple of people were murdered, and there was quite a hullaballoo about the whole thing, out in Chicago. Well, that finished up Continental. Then United Press stepped in. When UP stepped in they took over everything...
...editor in chief of Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail, Laurence Gandar, who was arraigned last week for, as he put it, "fulfilling the recognized duty of a newspaper." As Gandar saw that duty, it included publishing a 1965 expose of conditions in South Africa's prisons, re lated mainly by an artist and onetime air force lieutenant named Harold Strachan. During three years as a political prisoner, Strachan recounted, he frequently saw black prisoners whipped, kicked and tortured with shocks from an electrotherapy machine. The Mail collected an affidavit from Strachan, and sworn corroborating statements from two warders...
Nettlesome Critic. Instead of investigating its prisons, the government investigated Gandar's sources. One by one, they were convicted of making false statements, on the strength of testimony from a parade of government witnesses -despite a presiding magistrate's suspicions that the 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...
They are charged under a stringent Prisons Act that makes it a crime to publish false 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...
...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...