Australians' convictions complicate massacre case

IS there anyone left in Australia who does not know who Martin Bryant is? Probably not.

Saturation coverage of last month's Port Arthur massacre has put the callow face of the accused man on coffee tables and television screens across the continent - in urban penthouses and in the loneliest corrugated-iron shacks of the Outback.

And that is precisely the problem facing Tasmania's legal system - the fact that it will be almost impossible to put together a panel of impartial jurors to hear Bryant's testimony.

Bryant's alleged idiosyncracies - his bestiality, his snuff movie collection, his studied avoidance of housekeeping - have been the stuff of shock-horror features, cantankerous columns and sober think-pieces ever since he ran out of the burning ruins of the Seascape guesthouse.

Australia has already found him guilty, with even the normally staid broadsheet, The Australian, dropping sub-judice formalities and publishing a photograph of him under the tabloid-like headline 'Face Of A Killer'.

It has now become contradictory to every neural impulse to say 'Martin Bryant' without adding or thinking 'the Port Arthur murderer'.

'The alleged Port Arthur gunman' is a piece of legal decorum that everybody privately jeers. But for his trial, which is expected to get underway next year, a nation will have to learn to use the word 'alleged'.

The coverage of Port Arthur is not the only example of media complicating the case of Regina vs Bryant, who was remanded on Wednesday via a video hook-up from his cell to Hobart Magistrates' Court.

Richard Ackland, editor of law magazine Justinian, said: 'The debate on gun law reform and video violence, even the broadcast of the memorial service, could be held to prejudice his chances of a fair trial.' All of this means an indefinite postponement of the trial - in effect, dropping the charges - cannot be ruled out, although it is highly unlikely given the fiasco this would cause.

And while the media trial has already found him guilty, an actual trial would most probably find him insane. Some of the hastily thrown together newspaper biographies of Bryant have mentioned schizophrenia, which would probably be his best defence.

Bryant's future is almost certainly a padded cell and, in the long-term, cultish infamy. He already has an Internet fan club, and he may well be a Charles Manson for the 21st century.

This assumes, of course, that there are impartial jurors to get any trial underway. Tasmania's Director of Public Prosecutions must be praying that somewhere on his tragic island he can find a media vacuum, with 12 people in it.