Opinion ID: 1376401
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Are the Statements Provable as False?

Text: At common law the defendant has the burden of proving the truth of a defamatory publication as an affirmative defense. Yetman, 168 Ariz. at 81, 811 P.2d at 333. The Supreme Court, however, recognized that this common law arrangement inhibited First Amendment freedom in cases where damages are sought for speech of public concern. See Hepps, 475 U.S. at 776-77, 106 S.Ct. at 1563-64. The Court, consequently, declared a new rule requiring the plaintiff to prove falsity in such cases. Id.; Yetman, 168 Ariz. at 81, 811 P.2d at 333. This requirement [f]oremost ... stands for the proposition that a statement on matters of public concern must be provable as false before there can be liability under state defamation law. Milkovich, 497 U.S. at 19-20, 110 S.Ct. at 2706. The Supreme Court illustrated the protection as follows: [U]nlike the statement, In my opinion Mayor Jones is a liar, the statement, In my opinion Mayor Jones shows his abysmal ignorance by accepting the teachings of Marx and Lenin, would not be actionable. Hepps ensures that a statement of opinion relating to matters of public concern which does not contain a provably false factual connotation will receive full constitutional protection. Id. We believe that Devlin's assessment is within this characterization. The letter reveals nothing more than her subjective impression of Turner's manner. The statements alleged to be defamatory contain no factual connotations that are provable. Devlin's characterizations of Turner's tone of voice as a demand[], of his interview as like a criminal interrogation, of his demeanor as rude and disrespectful, and of his manner as border[ing] on police brutality and, by implication, as outdated and uneducated are plainly her personal impression of Turner's interview methods. Surely, if Devlin perceived Turner's demand as a request, Turner would not have objected. Similarly, a description of his interrogation as questioning would have drawn no protest. Nor would there be grounds for legal complaint had Devlin reported that his manner was impolite and his techniques uninformed rather than rude, disrespectful, outdated, and uneducated. To determine whether Turner demanded or requested the child to stand, whether his inquiry was more like a criminal interrogation rather than questioning, whether his manner was rude, disrespectful, outdated, and uneducated as opposed to something less offensive all lie beyond the realm of factual ascertainment or proof. Finally, instead of describing Turner's manner as border[ing] on police brutality, if Devlin had chosen an analogy not so close to home (for example, bordering on barbarianism), the subjective nature of her criticism would be unassailable. We can conceive of no objective criteria that a jury could effectively employ to determine the accuracy of Devlin's assessment. Whether her assessment is true or false is simply not the kind of empirical question a factfinder can resolve. Yetman, 168 Ariz. at 81, 811 P.2d at 333. Unlike the word communist, where the adherence to party doctrine can be used to evaluate the accuracy of the characterization, see Yetman, 168 Ariz. at 81 & n. 8, 811 P.2d at 333 & n. 8, absent an implication of physical abuse, Devlin's comments have no bench mark with which to judge their accuracy, see Fleming, 454 N.E.2d at 100 (harsh critique of police behavior held to be unprovable nonassertion of fact); cf. Milkovich, 497 U.S. at 21, 110 S.Ct. at 2707 (connotation of perjury was sufficiently factual to be proven true or false, noting that its truthfulness can be determined by looking to a core of objective evidence). Milkovich made clear that First Amendment protection should not turn on such an intensely subjective evaluation.