Opinion ID: 854683
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Williams Articles

Text: Judge Kendall next argues that the Daily News’s articles regarding Ashley Williams are defamatory because they stated that Judge Kendall allowed Williams “to spend the weekend in the community unsupervised.” In fact, Judge Kendall had placed him under house arrest. This is an ordinary defamatory statement rather than one by implication, so to establish actual malice, Judge Kendall must show that the statement was made with “knowledge that [the] statement was false or [with] reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” 4 Because Judge Kendall needs to show both elements of actual malice to succeed, and we conclude that he cannot satisfy the communicative-intent elements, we need not address whether he can prove that the defendants knew of or recklessly disregarded the Castillo articles’ falsity. 28 Schiavone Constr. Co., 847 F.2d at 1089 (quoting Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 280) (quotation marks omitted). There is no evidence that the defendants knew their statement was false. Blackburn, who authored this article, was not informed that the statement was incorrect until litigation commenced. Judge Kendall argues, however, that Blackburn’s testimony demonstrates actual malice through recklessness. He contends that the jury must have determined from her testimony that she fabricated her “unsupervised” description because she did not have a source for the assertion. Fabrication may constitute recklessness, St. Amant, 390 U.S. at 732, but the jury did not necessarily conclude that she was without a source for her article. The relevant testimony is: Q: You didn’t tell [the public] that [Williams] had been placed under house arrest with arrangements to be made by the Marshals, right? A: No one there that night, none of those officers who were there, not a single one of them were saying, oh, Mr. Williams is under house arrest. Q: Did you ask that question? A: No, sir. 29 ... Q: Miss Blackburn, did you walk over to any of those people, those law enforcement people, and say, could you tell me what’s going on here? What are the circumstances of Mr. Williams being in his home? You had already written your story two days earlier. You knew he had been convicted. A: Yeah, I knew he had been convicted. And – Q: So, didn’t you think it was important, before you told the community that Judge Kendall had just let him out unsupervised in the community, to be accurate and truthful? A: Nobody who was there was saying the man is supervised. ... Q: Now, you claimed, as I understand it, that the source for the words that you used “released unsupervised in the community” was Assistant Attorney General Renee Gumbs Carty who said those words to you on a telephone call in which another Assistant Attorney General name[d] Kerry 30 Drue supposedly was listening in. Is that your testimony? A: . . . Yes, sir. Q: And I just want to be very clear for the jury. Your testimony under oath is that Renee Gumbs Carty said to you in a telephone call in which Attorney General Kerry Drue . . . was on the phone as well, that Judge Kendall had released Mr. Williams for the weekend unsupervised in the community. Is that your testimony? A: My recollection is that they send [sic] him home for the—that they said that the Judge—at the request of the defense that the Judge sent Mr. Williams home for the weekend to get his affairs in order. Q: Did they tell you that Judge Kendall had released Mr. Williams for the weekend unsupervised in the community; yes or no. A: I told you what my recollection of what they said to me was. Q: So they didn’t tell you that. 31 A: They said at the request of the defense, again, that Judge Kendall allowed him to go home for the weekend to get his affairs in order. Q: Did they use the word “unsupervised”— words “unsupervised in the community,” Miss Blackburn? Yes or no. A: I don’t recall them using the word “unsupervised.” The only conclusion the jury must have drawn from this testimony is that none of the officers at the standoff and none of the prosecutors Blackburn spoke with told her that Williams was released into the community “unsupervised.” This is a necessary conclusion because if the jury believed that the officers or the prosecutors did tell her this, then there would be direct evidence that Blackburn believed that Williams was, in fact, unsupervised. Importantly, the jury did not necessarily conclude that Blackburn lacked a source for her story. To reach that conclusion, the jury would have needed to make the inferential conclusions that being sent “home” is different from being “unsupervised” and that the officers’ lack of discussion of supervision was irrelevant to whether Blackburn had a source. Although these are reasonable inferences, they are not ones we need to defer to under 32 independent review if our review of the evidence brings us to a contrary conclusion. See Harte-Hanks, 491 U.S. at 690; Newton, 930 F.2d at 670–71 (explaining that in the independent-appellate-review context, the “presumption of correctness” of jury determinations “applies with less force when a factfinder’s findings rely on its weighing of evidence and drawing inferences”). The evidence does not support the conclusion that Blackburn fabricated her story. The parties agree that she was at the scene of Williams’s standoff, and her testimony shows that the officers did not tell her that Williams was under house arrest. Furthermore, the prosecutors explained that Judge Kendall sent Williams “home.” 5 Finally, there is no evidence that Blackburn had any information that Williams was under house arrest. Cf. Schiavone Constr., 847 F.2d at 1090 (explaining that recklessness can be found where “the defendant finds internal inconsistencies or apparently reliable information that contradicts [the defendant’s] libelous assertions, but nevertheless publishes those statements anyway”). Blackburn’s conclusion that Williams was unsupervised is thus reasonably derived from her observations at the 5 We may consider Blackburn’s testimony regarding what the officers and prosecutors told her because the jury did not necessarily reject it. They likely gave it little weight, but their weighing of the evidence is accorded little deference under our standard of review. 33 scene and her knowledge that he was sent “home.” Although she could have done more to verify the facts of her story, the information she had assembled shows that her conclusion was not fabricated. Actual malice thus cannot be established on the basis that the defendants fabricated the story. Judge Kendall’s alternative basis for actual malice is that Blackburn should have done more to verify the facts of her Williams article. She was at least reckless regarding her story’s falsity, he argues, because she never sought the transcript of the hearing in which Judge Kendall imposed house arrest. This cannot serve as a basis for finding actual malice, however, because “failure to investigate before publishing, even when a reasonably prudent person would have done so, is not sufficient to establish reckless disregard” absent some evidence showing that the defendant seriously doubted the truth of the statement. Harte-Hanks, 491 U.S. at 688. The lack of evidence showing any doubt, coupled with the determination that the story was not fabricated, means that there is insufficient evidence that the defendants acted with actual malice.