One wonders, now that the 37-year-old arrested in connection with the Suffolk murders has been released (albeit on police bail), whether the decisions of various media outlets - the BBC and the Mirror included - to publish interviews with him was overly wise.

I couldn't believe it when I first heard the interview being broadcast. All the legal training I've been given would point to this being at best a bit reckless and, at worst, likely to cause serious prejudice to any possible trial. But nobody at the BBC is going to have aired it without the legal team going through every second of it first. As a legal example it goes to show the changing, shades-of-grey nature of broadcast law, rather than suggesting anything's gone horribly wrong.

Yet I'm still surprised it ended up on air. The gentleman concerned apparently had the word of the BBC that it would be used for background purposes and would not be aired. Just because the man ends up being arrested, it doesn't immediately invalidate any responsibility to keep promises made to him. It's a major journalistic scoop to have that interview, but it's a little morally vacant to go back on your word in the process.

If it were me, I'd have kept the interview back and only used it at the end of any future trial. That five or ten minutes would have made an immensely powerful backbone for a retrospective documentary had the gentleman been convicted. As it is, expending such emotionally charged ammunition at a legally risky moment, before the subject has been charged with any crime, feels to me like jumping the gun.

I've read Adrian Van-Klaveren's justification and can see what he's getting at (he's one of the people in charge of these big decisions - not a job I currently envy), but keeping the interview back until it could have been used in the cold light of day wouldn't have diminished the journalistic skill involved in getting it. More to the point, if the gentleman turns out to be entirely innocent, BBC News could have talked to him about using parts of it - or quietly shelved it as the background information it originally was.