By any yardstick, the rare offences that newspaper editors commit by breaching reporting restrictions are not a major social ill requiring heavy-handed sanctions.

They are infrequent and almost always unwitting. They rarely go undetected; those concerned generally feel mortified by the error; and recidivism rates are low.

So it was a surprise when it emerged the Attorney-General had approved the costly prosecution of Macclesfield Express editor David Lafferty after a sex assault victim was wrongly named in his newspaper.