(Credit: Milton Keynes Citizen, screenshot)

UK newspaper the Milton Keynes Citizen must pay a  £900 fine and “compensation to each of the three youths” it identified “in a news-in-brief court report,” the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade reported.

The Citizen is a local newspaper, according to Mondo Times.

The newspaper’s publisher’s lawyer Jonathan Scherbel-Ball said that the identification was a “completely innocent mistake” but that the publisher “fully accepts responsibility.”

He added that the error was that the newspaper’s reporter “believed the legal age of an adult in court was 16, and not 18. His mistake was not spotted by senior staff.”