Prison chiefs made a late-night legal bid to block the publishing of harrowing video and pictures showing the final conscious moment of death-in-custody prisoner Allan Marshall.
The Sunday Mail exclusively revealed CCTV images today which show the 30-year-old being dragged naked across a corridor and restrained by guards with a towel held over his face at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison in March 2015.
At a Court of Session hearing shortly after midnight last night, lawyers acting for the Scottish Prison Service asked for an interdict preventing the paper from making public pictures of the events leading up to the dad’s death - which was the subject of a Fatal Accident Inquiry last year.
The eleventh-hour legal bid began at 9.30pm and the paper received notice to attend Court of Session to answer a petition to stop publication of the images - after the presses had started rolling.
Prison chiefs argued that their guards’ privacy would be breached but the Sunday Mail’s lawyers successfully argued that no one would be identified in the images, which have been pixelated.
In a hearing which started at 12.30am in front of Lord Beckett, the Sunday Mail agreed to hold off on publication of the video for 72 hours to allow for full legal discussion on the matter. The hearing was adjourned after 10 minutes.
Sunday Mail editor Brendan McGinty said: “This story is clearly in the public interest. The images were published with the full blessing of Allan Marshall’s family who feel they have been denied justice.
“The images of all the prison officers involved were fully pixelated so that they could not be identified.
“I was made aware of an attempt to interdict after our presses had started to roll and I am grateful to our legal team who travelled to the Court of Session at such short notice. They informed me after 1am that the motion had been dropped.
“Whether this was an appropriate use of public money is now a question for others to answer but anyone supportive of press freedom will surely welcome the fact that the story was published.”
A Scottish Prison Service spokesman confirmed the legal action and said the matter was likely to be back before the courts early next week.
