I'm guessing in court they have to say their full name, and the media uses that to protect anyone with the same first and last names.

We all have three names, first, middle, last.  

Using them all for people who are notorious does minimize the chance of confusion.  Although where I live there is a woman with all three names the same as mine about 20-30 miles away.  Sure hope she never gets on the news :smile:

Marsha

I'm guessing in court they have to say their full name, and the media uses that to protect anyone with the same first and last names.

Or more realistically, to protect their business & profits from lawsuits alleging defamation.  Generally speaking, there's no legal requirement that a lawsuit have legal merit for it to be filed by a plaintiff, forcing a legal response from its defendant(s).  The full name might be mandated by editions of the Associated Press Style & Libel Manual.

When not relevant to a crime, I've long considered the routine use of a 3-full-part name to be an affectation of the ruling classes of New England & New York, e.g.:
Charles Nelson Reilly (actor/comedian)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (U.S. president, albeit before I was born,
and reportedly often simply "F.D.R.")
Henry Steele Commager (historian)
John Foster Dulles (lawyer-diplomat, later U.S. Secretary of State: 1953--1959; namesake of Washington Dulles International Airport)
Richard Henry Dana (seafaring author)
John Jacob Astor (Palatinate-native German, immigrant fur-trade magnate, "first multi-millionaire" in U.S.A. per Wikipedia)
John Quincy Adams (U.S. President; his father was merely U.S. President John Adams Jr., Quincy being the family name of Jr.'s mother-in-law)
Samuel Eliot Morison (historian: What other "Samuel Morison" did he fear being confused with?)

But it's not exclusively a Yankee affectation, e.g.:
Lyndon Baines Johnson (Texan, U.S. President following assassination of J.F.K.)
John Noble Wilford (Kentuckian, but master's degree from Syracuse U. (N.Y.), then Pulitzer-Prize-winning science-writer for N.Y. Times)
Hans Christian Andersen (Danish author of fairy-tales)

Mao Tse-tung

Major fail ! 

Among more-or-less traditional Chinese--as distinct from ethnic Chinese in Western-Culture environments (not only Silicon Valley (Cal.), but reportedly also Hong Kong)--using the old British-devised Wade-Gilles transliteration, an apparent 1-syllable first-name is actually a person's family name, and the usually-2-syllable-hyphenated apparent last-name is actually a given name.

So if one were to diplomatically set aside the millions of his own people whose deaths are attributed to his personal orders as Communist dictator, he would've properly been formally addressed as Mr. Mao, not Mr. Tung nor Mr. Tse-tung.