Following a report in the Eastern Province Herald of 31 January 1979 that Anglican prisoners in Grahamstown had not been ministered to for 13 months, the editor of the Herald, Mr. H.E. O'Connor, and a reporter, Mrs. Jill Joubert, were charged in the Grahamstown Magistrate's Court on 14 August 1979 under the Prisons Act.
It was alleged that they published false information about the administration of a prison without taking reasonable steps to verify the information.
Their report said Anglican priests had been kept out of the prison because of the rejection of an application to become prison chaplain by the Dean of Grahamstown, the Very Reverend Godfrey Ashby. It quoted the Dean as saying that this had meant that Anglican prisoners had not been able to celebrate Christmas or Easter.
Col. Jacobus Fourie, chief liaison officer with the Department of Prisons said the report was untrue. He said he had no call from the Herald to verify the story.
Col. Ian Scott of the chaplain-general's department in the Commissioner of Prisons' office said he received Dean Ashby's application to become prison chaplain on 12 January 1978 and wrote back in July refusing the application. He said the reason the reply took six months was classified information. He admitted that some of the disputed paragraphs in the report were in fact true.
The magistrate said he could not find that the information was false and acquitted the two journalists.
The Prisons Act, No. 8 of 1959, was passed when shocking exposures of South African prison conditions were appearing in the press. The Act made it a criminal offence to publish 'false information' about prisons: it effectively stopped the publication of any information about prisons.
