Decision to come Friday on publication ban

•Adecision on whether the news media can republish certain details about last week’s deadly shootings in Fredericton will be made on Friday.

On Monday morning, media organizations reported new information about the interaction between the alleged gunman and the police that was contained in the Prosecutor’s Information Sheets, a publicly available document. Later that day, at the request of the Public Prosecutions Office, the Court of Queen’s Bench granted a retroactive publication ban on the information contained in the sheet, compelling all media outlets in Canada to remove the information they had published on their websites and forbidding them from republishing it.

The ban also sought to prevent any information from the sheet from being published “until the end of criminal proceedings.”

But when a Court of Queen’s Bench hearing on the ban began on Wednesday, the Crown’s request had been amended: prosecutor Cameron Gunn said his office is now seeking a ban only on the names that were included in the sheet — other than those of constables Lawrence Robert Costello and Sara Mae Helen Burns, and one unnamed civilian — from being published.

Lawyer David Coles, representing Postmedia News, Brunswick News, CBC, CTV, Global and the Globe and Mail, argued the ban should be lifted in its entirety.

Justice Judy Clendening is expected to rule on the matter on Friday morning.

Matthew Vincent Raymond, 48, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder in connection to the shootings. He is scheduled to make a court appearance Aug. 27.

Gunn said the Crown was no longer concerned that release of information other than the names would damage a potential jury pool or damage vulnerable witnesses. But, he said, he was concerned about the privacy interests of the individuals named in the sheet.

Coles, meanwhile, said there were no affidavits filed with the court to support the argument for privacy.

“When somebody wants to close part of (the judicial process) so that you don’t get to know or see a particular document or thing, the burden is on the person who wants to do that,” Coles said outside court. “It’s important that people stand up and protect that right. It’s a freedom that we have and it allows us to police the justice system.”