Jonathan Wamback was briefly back in the media spotlight early this week. He’s the Newmarket teen who survived a vicious beating in 1999 by a gang of teenaged thugs.
Memories of Jonathan’s ordeal 16 days on life support, three months in a coma were revived in a TV film shown Monday on CTV.
The young man has become a victim with a human face. But no thanks to a paternalistic law that bars media from identifying teen victims of teen violence, even with parental consent.
Reduced to four unflattering snapshots, here is how Ottawa’s Young Offenders Act (YOA) played a confusing, even confounding part in the telling of Jonathan’s story.
Scene 1: On June 29, 1999, Jonathan was beaten in a park. Soon afterward, his name and sometimes his face appeared on network TV, radio, community newspapers, The Toronto Sun and National Post. By identifying him, the media outlets flouted the YOA, which prohibits publication or broadcast of names or details that could identify young (under 18) victims or witnesses in cases involving accused young offenders.
Scene 2: Three months later, on Oct. 1, The Star abandoned its usual stance of obeying laws and courts, and named him. As managing editor Mary Deanne Shears put it: “He had gone public.” Jonathan had by then emerged from his coma, his family already had set up a Web site, and the paper had received the family’s permission to run his name. (Ironically, had Jonathan been attacked by an adult, media outlets could have named him immediately.)
Scene 3: In autumn of 2000, three teenagers charged with aggravated assault in the case went on trial in Etobicoke. Under the Young Offenders Act, their names couldn’t be published. Jonathan then had to go back under cover: his well-known (by then) name no longer could be printed or broadcast with impunity. Two of the accused offenders were convicted; one was acquitted.
Scene 4: On Feb. 6, 2001, Jonathan’s father, Joe, had to go back to court to get a judge’s special permission for his son’s name to be publishable again. “Jonathan has nothing to be ashamed of,” he said later. “Suppressing his name meant Jonathan was being revictimized.”
All of which leads us to the way youth victims will be treated in the new Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). The act, given royal assent Feb. 19, is tentatively scheduled to take effect in April, 2003.
A justice department official, declining to be named, explained Thursday that with three exceptions, the names of under-18 victims of young offenders will remain unpublishable. The exceptions:
If the victim is under 18, parental and court permission will be needed;
If the victim dies, the parents could apply to a court to release the name. If a newspaper obtained the dead victim’s name and ran it, the official said, it would break the law; and
If the victim turns 18, he or she can go public without permission.(Jonathan Wamback is now 18.)
In other words, victims, their families and the media will continue to be hamstrung by an awkward law that Parliament could easily have fixed.
Asked to explain the government’s thinking, the official demurred, but said: “…We have always protected the names of young offenders, and most of the time if you identify the name of the victim, you identify the name of the young offender.”
That wasn’t true in Jonathan’s case. Why not let families decide themselves whether to make the victim’s name public? “In some cases it might be contrary to the interests of the victim,” the official explained.
More paternalism? This new law seems no improvement over an old law that commanded little respect.
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ombud@thestar
