Opinion ID: 1155573
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: man found guilty of fornication

Text: .... An Albemarle County Circuit Court jury found Jeffery [sic] Williams of 2221 Jefferson Towne apartments guilty of fornication Wednesday and fined him $100. Williams, 31, had been charged with the rape on May 8 of Debra C. Matthews, 23, of Whitewood Villiage [sic] Apartments. Fornication, a misdemeanor, is the crime of voluntary sexual intercourse by an unmarried person. According to Miss Matthews' testimony at the preliminary hearing, the incident occurred at the apartment of Williams' sister, Rosyln Wood. Miss Matthews, who was pregnant at the time, had gone there to dress because the electricity was out at her apartment. The remainder of the article, continuing to refer to the plaintiff as Miss Matthews, related the facts of the alleged rape and summarized statements of Williams' attorney made after the criminal trial. The case was tried to a jury and, at the conclusion of the plaintiff's evidence, the claim of punitive damages was abandoned. The jury found in favor of the plaintiff and fixed her compensatory damages at $25,000. The trial court confirmed the verdict, and we awarded the newspaper an appeal from the January 1983 judgment order. The defendant contends that the article was not actionable as a matter of law, that compensatory damages are recoverable against a media defendant in a libel suit only upon proof of New York Times malice and not mere negligence, that the evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to establish negligence, and that the trial court erred in refusing to instruct on qualified privilege and nominal damages. The trial court applied a negligence standard. No further discussion is necessary to explain our disagreement with the newspaper's contention that the New York Times malice standard should be adopted for proof of compensatory damages. The question whether the content of the article makes substantial danger to reputation apparent was not an issue below. Nevertheless, we are of opinion that the limitation on application of the negligence standard should not operate in this case. As we have said, the threshold determination to be made, under the limitation and before applying the negligence principle, is whether as a matter of law, when viewing the circumstances objectively, a reasonable and prudent editor should have anticipated that the words used contained an imputation necessarily harmful to reputation. Manifestly, the content of a news item which states that an unmarried woman is pregnant creates a substantial danger to reputation and should warn a reasonably prudent editor of the item's defamatory potential. One reasonable construction from such a reference is that the female committed the crime of fornication and became pregnant from the act. Therefore, the trial court's adoption of the negligence rule was proper. In a sense, the foregoing discussion on defamatory potential forecasts our decision on the newspaper's claim that the trial court should have decided, as a matter of law, that the article was not in fact defamatory instead of permitting the jury to pass on the question. Although varying circumstances often make it difficult to determine whether particular language is defamatory, it is a general rule that allegedly defamatory words are to be taken in their plain and natural meaning and to be understood by courts and juries as other people would understand them, and according to the sense in which they appear to have been used. In order to render words defamatory and actionable it is not necessary that the defamatory charge be in direct terms but it may be made indirectly, and it matters not how artful or disguised the modes in which the meaning is concealed if it is in fact defamatory. Accordingly, a defamatory charge may be made by inference, implication or insinuation. Carwile v. Richmond Newspapers, 196 Va. 1, 7, 82 S.E.2d 588, 591-92 (1954). Not only should a reasonably prudent editor have appreciated the defamatory potential of the item in question, the publication was sufficiently defamatory on its face, under Carwile, to permit a jury to decide whether in fact the statement actually was defamatory. Thus, the trial court did not err in failing to decide the question as a matter of law. The defendant attacks on appeal the sufficiency of the evidence to prove negligence. That issue was not raised in the trial court. During argument of its motion to strike the evidence, made at the conclusion of the plaintiff's case and renewed at the end of the evidence, the defendant argued against adoption of the negligence standard. It never contended that the evidence was insufficient to raise a jury issue as to defendant's negligence. After the trial judge announced that he would apply the negligence standard, the defendant argued only two issues. First, it asserted that the publication was not actionable. Second, it argued that the paper should be exonerated on the basis of qualified privilege. Moreover, in stating its objections to the instructions, the defendant did not argue insufficiency of the evidence, only that the standard should be New York Times malice and not negligence. Accordingly, we will not notice on appeal an issue that was not raised in the trial court. Rule 5:21. Parenthetically, it is quite understandable why sufficiency of the evidence was not raised below because, as will be apparent from the discussion that follows, evidence of the newspaper's negligence was abundant. Discussion of defendant's contention that it was protected from the accidental mistake by qualified privilege requires a brief recitation of the facts. The author of the article had been hired as a part-time reporter and photographer by the newspaper about a month before the item was published. The young reporter had received no training, guidance, or instruction in covering the courthouse beat. His only prior experience consisted of: work on his high school yearbook; participation in two college journalism courses; and compilation of information for one magazine article. The reporter did not attend the rape trial in the circuit court or the preliminary hearing on the charge in the general district court. Instead, he based his article on a review of the transcript of testimony given at the preliminary hearing, without knowing whether that same testimony was presented in the circuit court trial. The plaintiff was identified throughout the preliminary hearing transcript as Mrs. Matthews. The reporter claimed to have obtained some of the facts from an interview with a circuit court deputy clerk, but the clerk testified that she only handed the reporter the court file and did not talk to him. The defense attorney in the criminal trial testified that the reporter merely asked him by telephone for a comment on the outcome of the trial. During examination by the plaintiff as an adverse witness, the reporter admitted that he did not talk to the criminal defendant, the Commonwealth's Attorney or any of his assistants, the court reporter who was present at trial, the bailiff on duty in the courtroom, the investigating police officer, anyone in the sheriff's office, anyone at the hospital where the plaintiff was taken after the alleged rape, the judge, or any jurors. The reporter testified that his use of Miss was just a slip of my memory. The defendant's city editor, supervisor of the reporter who wrote the article, testified that although The Daily Progress had a policy of not printing names of alleged rape victims, the paper printed the plaintiff's name in this instance because the jury had determined she was not a victim of rape. He also testified that he had no idea that the reference to the plaintiff was false, and that nothing about the article put him on notice of a factual mistake. He stated that it never occurred to him that calling a person Miss and saying she was pregnant might be offensive. As we have said, the common-law qualified privileges survive establishment of the negligence standard for compensatory damage recovery in Virginia. Nevertheless, we reject the newspaper's contention that it was entitled to an instruction on the defense of privilege in this case. The defendant argues that its account of the court proceedings was a fair, impartial, and substantially accurate report, and that the trial court erred in failing to permit the jury to determine whether the privilege applied and, if so, whether the paper abused the privilege. We hold that the defamatory words, as a matter of law, were not substantially accurate. Manifestly, the only factual errors in the article related to the paper's description of Mrs. Matthews' marital status. Nonetheless, the defamatory content of the article is not cured by the newspaper's otherwise substantially accurate account of the criminal trial. The designation of Mrs. Matthews as Miss was wholly inaccurate. That act was at the root of the wrong that defamed her. The clear error in describing the plaintiff's marital status, coupled with the gratuitous mention in the article of her pregnancy, resulted in damage to her reputation. Hence, the inaccurate publication deprives the newspaper of the benefit of the privilege that arises from reporting court proceedings. See Times-Dispatch v. Zoll, 148 Va. 850, 857-58, 139 S.E. 505, 507 (1927). Finally, the defendant contends the trial court erred in refusing to instruct the jury on nominal damages as follows: Nominal damages are those recoverable where a legal right is to be vindicated against an invasion that has produced no actual present loss of any kind or where, from the nature of the case, some injury has been done the amount of which the proof fails to show. The law infers some damage from the invasion of a right. In this connection the court instructs you that, if you believe from the evidence that there is no proof of actual damage to the plaintiff resulting proximately from the defendant's acts, you may award her nominal damages only. Relying on News Leader Co. v. Kocen, 173 Va. 95, 3 S.E.2d 385 (1939), the defendant argues that giving a compensatory damage instruction without a corresponding instruction on nominal damages creates an imbalance that is objectionable and consequently constitutes reversible error. We do not agree. In Kocen, the trial court used the word substantial twice in the damage instruction to modify the word compensatory. Overturning a judgment for the plaintiff, the Court said: The reversible error lies in the fact that the instructions emphasized the right of the plaintiff to recover substantial damages without any instruction laying equal emphasis on the fact that the jury might return a verdict for nominal damages. 173 Va. at 110, 3 S.E.2d at 392. In the present case, unlike Kocen, there was no instruction inviting the jury to award substantial damages. Hence, there being no need to counterbalance, an instruction on nominal damages was unnecessary, and the trial court correctly refused to so instruct. For these reasons, the judgment below in favor of the plaintiff will be affirmed.