Just curious. When minors are accused of crimes is not showing faces or revealing names a legal requirement of some sort, or just a journalistic convention?
It’s definitely the law in Canada. Wikipedia summarizes when a young offender can or can’t be identified.
It is a statutory prohibition in this jurisdiction
In the U.S., it’s usually just convention. The Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co. that the if the information is obtained lawfully and is truthful, the state can’t prohibit it’s publication, unless there’s a substantial state interest.
In Japan it’s the law, however at least until recently, the law didn’t actually stipulate any punishment for violating it. For the most part, newspapers and TV stations abided by the rule until about 1997, when a 14-year-old brutally murdered a 10-y.o. girl and a 12-y.o. boy in two separate incidents. Focus magazine published his photo and his name, and while the authorities waggled their fingers and made stern noises about the whole thing, they had no way of actually doing anything to punish Focus. The law was probably amended since then, but I haven’t heard anything about it.
The frightening thing about not publicizing the juvenile’s name is that the public is not aware of just what kind of person is hanging around. Registered sex offenders are listed online and your local police department can give you a list of them and their addresses. But a juvenile who was convicted of sexual assault or rape is not listed. The only people who will know about him are the district attorney, the local police department and his school officials (to make sure the he doesn’t violate any terms of his probation like being alone with kids under a certain age, etc.). You will never know that the 15 year old kid next door to you molested a 5 year old girl. Scary thought, huh.
I remember one case involving a group of three teenagers who had killed a man at a gas station, or something like that. I was delivering newspapers after school at the time, so got to see a lot of the front pages.
Always seemed a little bit funny that they mentioned the names and showed pictures while the trio was still on the run from police, but after they’d been caught the descriptions went back to referring to them with their gender and age - sort of like closing the barn door after the horse got out in terms of actually keeping anything private by that point.
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/juvenileSentboston.htm
As others have noted, the Supreme Court has held that publishing juvenile’s information isn’t punishable. Most juvenile courts, however, do not release the information in the first place. If, as in Smith (information obtained over police scanner), and Oklahoma Publishing Co. v. Oklahoma County District Court, 430 U.S. 308 (1977): http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=430&invol=308 (information and photos obtained at “closed” court proceeding where press was allowed to be present) once the cat is out of the bag it’s a prior restraint to stop publication of the information.