Opinion ID: 1536152
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Sufficiency of Allegations

Text: The gravamen of the complaint consisted of the statements by appellees that appellants were violating the controlled dangerous substance laws of the State, that they were using the police office and lockers to facilitate their illegal activity, and that Mengel had been implicated in the theft of cellular phones and had planted controlled dangerous substances on citizens in an effort to knowingly make false arrests. Those statements are obviously accusations of criminal activity on the part of appellants. The complaint alleges that those statements were false and that appellees knew or should have known that they were false. It alleges that, in making those statements, appellees acted in reckless disregard of the truth and that they were made for the malicious purpose of embarrassing [appellants] and causing them to be subject to public ridicule, scorn, dishonor, and embarrassment and to ruin their careers as Baltimore City Police Officers. The false statements, the complaint adds, were leaked by appellees to members of the news media for the express purpose of causing publication of the false statements. As a direct result of the malicious defamation, Smith's police powers were suspended on January 13, 2006, and both plaintiffs have suffered great emotional trauma and other damage, including the ruination of their police careers. Appellees raise three objections with respect to those allegations. First, they contend that, as police officers, appellants are public officials subject to the more rigorous standards of New York Times v. Sullivan , and that they may not recover for defamation unless they plead and show that appellees had actual knowledge that their statements were false or acted with reckless disregard of whether those statements were true or false. The allegations of the complaint, they aver, fail to satisfy that exacting standard. They regard the allegations that they acted with malice and reckless disregard of truth as mere buzz words. Although this Court does not seem to have ruled directly on the matter, it appears to be well-settled, in part from opinions of the U.S. District Court for Maryland, that police officers, from patrol officers to chiefs, are regarded for New York Times purposes as public officials. [8] To recover, therefore, appellants will have to prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that appellees acted with what has been termed Constitutional malice, i.e., that they either knew their statements were false or acted with reckless disregard of whether they were true or false. The complaint alleges that the statements charging criminal behavior on the part of appellants were false and were made with reckless disregard of truth or falsity. The complaint is very thin with respect to facts supporting the averment of reckless disregard, and it may well be that appellees have a right to further detail. There is enough there, however, to preclude, on a first motion to dismiss, a dismissal with prejudice. If the court regarded the allegations as merely conclusory and insufficient, it should have permitted appellants to amend their complaint, if they properly can, to provide a greater factual basis. Thus, if the court's dismissal with prejudice was based on the insufficiency of the allegations to withstand a New York Times defense, it abused its discretion. That is true as well with respect to appellees' argument that the complaint failed to allege the elements of the common law tort of defamation. To present a prima facie common law case for defamation, a plaintiff must plead and prove four things: that the defendant made a defamatory statement to a third person; that the statement was false; that the defendant was legally at fault in making the statement; and that the plaintiff thereby suffered harm. Gohari v. Darvish, 363 Md. 42, 54, 767 A.2d 321, 327 (2001), quoting from Rosenberg v. Helinski, 328 Md. 664, 675, 616 A.2d 866, 871 (1992). Words that falsely impute criminal conduct to a plaintiff are defamatory. A.S. Abell Co. v. Barnes, 258 Md. 56, 265 A.2d 207 (1970), cert. denied, 403 U.S. 921, 91 S.Ct. 2224, 29 L.Ed.2d 700 (1971). That the complaint was sufficient to allege the false imputation of criminal conduct to appellants does not seem to be contested by appellees and, in any event, is clear. Appellees make the curious argument that the complaint does not allege that the false statements were ever published or communicated to a third party. In making that argument, they ignore entirely the allegation that the statements were leaked to the news media and, instead, rely on Picone v. Talbott, 29 Md.App. 536, 546, 349 A.2d 615, 620-21 (1975) and Bartlett v. Christhilf, 69 Md. 219, 224, 14 A. 518, 519-20 (1888) for the proposition that statements made in an application for a warrant are not published. Those cases do not, in any way, support that proposition. Bartlett, as we shall see, did not involve and had nothing to do with a warrant. Picone, misconstruing some language in Bartlett, did hold that statements made in an application for arrest warrant were privileged, but it did not hold that such statements are not published. Whether a person has a privilege to make defamatory statements in a warrant application has nothing to do with whether the statements are published. Appellees' argument regarding falsity is even more peculiar. They claim that [n]o where in the complaint do Appellants allege that these statements have been proved false, and therefore, they utterly fail to satisfy an element of the tort of defamation. (Emphasis added). A plaintiff does not have to allege that defamatory statements have already, previously been proved false, but only that they are so. Falsity will have to be proved at trial. We have already addressed appellees' contention that the complaint fails to sufficiently allege reckless disregard of truth and need not repeat that discussion. Finally, appellees argue that the complaint fails to allege actual damages. That argument seems to be based on the fact that the plaintiffs neither lost their jobs nor were charged with a crime in relation to the execution of the search warrant. Appellees overlook the allegation that appellees' conduct caused appellants to have their police powers suspended, which would seem, by fair inference, to have precluded them from fulfilling the duties of a police officer and thus adversely affect their employment.