James Ryan O'Neill - Documentary

Documentary

In the 1990s, freelance journalist Janine Widgery approached a retired Victorian detective, Gordon Davie, with a proposal to make a documentary on James O'Neill. Davie saw no story suitable for a documentary and declined. In 1998 Davie read in a news report that O'Neill had been transferred in 1991 to the low security Hayes Prison Farm and was allowed to go fishing in the Derwent River unsupervised. The same report claimed that O'Neill had no criminal record prior to his conviction for murder. Davie thought this unlikely because Davie believed it was rare for a serial killer to start so late in life. Davie wrote to O'Neill asking for permission to interview him.

Davie interviewed him for the entire day with O'Neill claiming he had never even received so much as a parking ticket before the murders. Davie contacted Widgery and told her he didn't believe a word O'Neill had said and he thought there would be a story. Over the next four years Davie recorded hundreds of hours of their conversations.

O'Neill was highly intelligent and charismatic. Davie said afterwards: "He is one of the most likeable men you would ever meet. On the first day of filming there were six or seven out there and at end of the day I said, "What do you think of him?" They all said, "You've made a mistake, this bloke couldn't have done anything wrong", however a pattern emerged from the interviews, of the places O'Neill visited, children had gone missing in seven or eight of them. It was also alleged he was in Adelaide about the time the Beaumont children disappeared and that he had told people he was responsible for their disappearance.

The resulting documentary The Fishermen, named for O'Neills passion for fishing and Davies belief he also used the term as a euphemism for his murders, was scheduled for broadcast on ABC television on 21 April 2005 but O'Neill applied for an injunction on the grounds it was defamatory and would hurt his chances of parole. The case, O'Neill v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roar Film Pty Ltd and Davie, was heard by the Supreme Court on 22 April. The judge ruled in favour of O'Neill and granted an interlocutory injunction against the broadcast in Tasmania. As the documentary could still be viewed by 500 houses in northern Tasmania due to transmission overlap from the mainland the documentary was pulled nationwide. On 29 August 2005, the ABC's appeal against the decision was dismissed 2-1 by a full sitting of the Tasmanian Supreme Court. The ABC appealed this decision to the High Court of Australia in Sydney which in a 4-2 decision quashed the Tasmanian Supreme Court ruling allowing the program to be aired in October 2006.

Chief Justice Murray Gleeson and Justice Susan Crennan wrote in their joint judgement: "It is one thing for the law to impose consequences … in the case of an abuse of the right of free speech, It is another … for a court to interfere with the right of free speech by prior restraint."
Dissenting Justice Michael Kirby wrote: "Effectively, it means that any prisoner, serving a sentence for a heinous crime is fair game for anything at all that a media organisation … might choose to publish".