Opinion ID: 1155573
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Goochland

Text: Danny Johnson, bad check, $80. Leigh W. Hague, reckelss [sic] driving in boat, $63. Alvin Fleming, malicious wounding, $130, 90 days suspended. Harold F. Payne, aggravated sexual battery, Barbara H. Sweeny [sic], property bond; aggravated sexual battery, James and Virginia Harris, property bond charges certified to circuit court (charges filed in the adult division of juvenile court). Following a consolidated trial of the three cases, the jury found in favor of James and Virginia Harris, and Barbara Sweeney, fixing compensatory damages in the amounts of $30,000, $10,000, and $10,000, respectively. The jury did not award punitive damages. The trial court entered judgments on the verdicts, and we granted The Gazette an appeal from the February 1983 final orders. The assignments of error present issues pertaining to the standard of fault to be applied, sufficiency of the evidence, misdirection of the jury, and excessiveness of the verdicts. The evidence may be summarized briefly. In July of 1981, Payne was arrested and charged in Goochland County with aggravated sexual battery of the Harris child and the Sweeney child. The three parents were the complaining witnesses against Payne. A reporter for The Gazette prepared a narrative story about the incidents and submitted it to the paper's editor. After reviewing the draft, the editor directed the reporter to verify the charges from court records. The reporter examined the pertinent docket page of the Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court of Goochland County. The information on the docket sheet was contained in pre-printed columns, the head of each column containing preprinted or typed words and abbreviations. Symbols for respective columns, reading from left to right, were as follows: COUNSEL CA P W; OFFICER/CMPLNT BSE; and CCRE DATE APPEAL DATE. The reporter did not understand the meaning of the abbreviations except he knew CMPLNT designated complainant. The reporter copied that portion of the docket page pertaining to Payne's charges. He made a verbatim abstract except he did not include the column designations, the dates of the offenses, or the amounts of the property bonds. The copy became the draft of an article to be included in The Public Record section of the July 30th issue. The Public Record was a regular feature of the paper and routinely included information from the local public records about real estate transfers recorded, building permits issued, criminal cases heard, and marriage licenses issued. The reporter submitted his second draft to the editor, who approved it because he considered it to be accurate and concise. The editor testified, dissecting the article, that the item intended to convey to the reader that Payne was the defendant charged with aggravated sexual battery, that Mrs. Sweeney was the person placing the charge, and that Payne was out on a property bond. The editor continued: Semicolon, we start back with the antecedent, which is Mr. Payne, aggravated sexual battery again, James and Virginia Harris placing the charges. He further testified: Again, a property bond has been posted and the charges are certified to the Circuit Court. The evidence showed that only the defendant's name was inserted in the majority of listings in The Public Record and that, prior to the date in question, the names of complaining witnesses and crime victims were never listed. The plaintiffs showed that they had enjoyed good reputations prior to the publication and that they did not wish the vulgar incidents involving their children to become matters of public knowledge. They also proved that persons in the community interpreted the news item to mean they had been accused of immoral conduct. In addition, the plaintiffs established they were embarrassed, upset, hysterical, and emotionally damaged as the result of the publication. Over the newspaper's objection, the trial court applied a negligence standard. No additional discussion is necessary to explain our rejection of the newspaper's argument that New York Times malice should have been adopted by the trial court as the proper standard of liability. Application of the express limitation, which was articulated in Gertz and which now has been incorporated in the Virginia rule, was not an issue below. Nonetheless, we are of opinion that the content of the statement in question makes substantial danger to reputation apparent. In other words, the news item, under the circumstances, should warn a reasonably prudent editor of its defamatory potential. The threshold determination to be made by a trial judge on the question whether there is substantial danger to reputation apparent from the content of a publication resembles the determination traditionally made by the court on the question whether a statement is libelous per se. A trial judge must decide, viewing the circumstances objectively, whether a reasonable and prudent editor should have anticipated that the words used contained an imputation necessarily harmful to reputation. We hold that the harmful potential of the words used here, i.e., that plaintiffs were accused of crimes, should have been apparent to the paper's editor, if he had exercised ordinary care. Viewed objectively, the publication may be interpreted to report that Mrs. Sweeney and the Harrises had been charged with aggravated sexual assault. The evidence showed that prior to the date of the publication in question, no edition of The Gazette had published in The Public Record portion of the paper the name of any person except that of a defendant. Indeed, the three cases reported immediately above the Payne charges apparently recited the names of the defendants only. Also, the article contained no information which explained the significance of the names appearing in the segment referring to the plaintiffs. A reader, perusing the words in sequence, would probably conclude from the arrangement of the language that the plaintiffs were charged with crimes and that they had been required to post property bonds in order to remain at large and free of custody pending trial of the charges. Such a conclusion would be justified because the information follows the same patterncharge, name of person or persons charged, and requirement of bond. The listing of Payne's name at the beginning of the item is a confusing factor but does not detract from the defamatory potential of the remaining language. Under these circumstances, a reasonable and prudent editor should have been alerted to the likelihood of damage to reputation. The publication was not merely confusing, unclear, and garbled (conditions which ordinarily would not create defamatory potential); it also used language containing imputations necessarily harmful to reputation. Consequently, the express limitation was not applicable and the trial court correctly adopted the negligence standard. The Gazette contends that even if the trial court was correct in applying a negligence standard of liability, the court erred in submitting the case to the jury on that issue. The newspaper argues there was insufficient evidence on which a rational juror could conclude that the paper was negligent. We disagree. The pertinent instruction informed the jury, in part, that in order to establish that Gazette was at fault, plaintiffs must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Gazette acted with negligence in preparing and publishing the article. This instruction comports with the essential elements of the standard we have articulated today. The evidence showed that the editor believed the report to be true although, reasonably interpreted, the article was false. The editor testified that he thought the item was accurate and concise because it was an apparent verbatim copy of a court record. But it was for the jury to determine whether the principals of The Gazette, the reporter and editor in this case, lacked reasonable grounds for their belief in the accuracy of the article or, alternatively, negligently failed to ascertain the facts, especially because the publication did not identify the roles the plaintiffs played in the criminal proceedings reported. This failure to describe the significance of the names appearing in the item resulted from carelessness in preparing and publishing the article, in the language of the instruction. On the question of negligent preparation, we already have discussed the reporter's admitted inability to interpret the symbols, except for CMPLNT, on the docket page. No verification of the information finally gathered was sought by the reporter or suggested by the editor. Consequently, a complete understanding of the only source of information, the court record, was essential to the accuracy and clarity of the report. The jury was entitled to conclude that the reporter was negligent because of his ignorance. The jury also was entitled to find that the negligence should not have been excused merely because the court record was copied almost verbatim and because the format of the publication did not deviate substantially from the form of the docket page. Finally, the article did not even include the information conveyed by the symbol CMPLNT, the only abbreviation understood by the reporter. This was an act of omission that the jury also could determine constituted negligence. There were substantial additional facts presented on the question of negligent publication. For example, the reporter who wrote the article testified the item looked like an error, thereby admitting that the article conveyed an inaccurate representation of the plaintiffs' involvement in sensitive crimes. The editor indicated the item was not unclear, but The Gazette `s publisher, when asked if he understood what the article said, replied, I think I do. The publisher, who did not review the article before printing, conceded he previously had stated that he understood the article to mean the plaintiffs had posted property bonds because they charged somebody with aggravated sexual assault. (emphasis added). In addition, the jury was entitled to determine whether, in reporting crimes of this magnitude, the long-standing custom of The Gazette should have been violated, by publication of the complaining witnesses' names, without greater care being exercised to assure that the item's format accurately conveyed the information reported. Next, the newspaper contends the trial court erroneously instructed the jury that it could award damages for injury to reputation. While conceding that the plaintiffs established they enjoyed good reputations in Powhatan County prior to the publication, the paper asserts that, with one exception, there was not a shred of evidence of what the plaintiffs' respective reputations were after the alleged libel. The defendant contends that Mrs. Sweeney's employer testified that Mrs. Sweeney's reputation did not suffer in the least as a result of the publication. The newspaper asserts that other witnesses opined that the Harrises' reputation had not changed an iota as the result of the libel. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, who are before us, armed with jury verdicts approved by the trial court, we find there was sufficient circumstantial evidence of damage to plaintiffs' reputation caused by the libel. For example, Mr. Harris testified that following publication of the article, which essentially charged the plaintiffs with being sexual perverts in a rural county, neighborhood children stopped coming to the house. Harris also testified that he had observed differences in the way neighbors treated him before and after the incident. A friend of the plaintiffs testified that his prior good opinion of the Harrises and Mrs. Sweeney was renewed after the incident only upon a full explanation of the meaning of the news report. Next, defendant claims the trial court misdirected the jury by refusing two instructions on the issue of damages. We find no error in this regard. An instruction tendered by defendant on the question of proximate cause was an incorrect statement of the law. A nominal damage instruction proffered by the paper had two vices. First, if given, it improperly would have suggested to the jury the amount of a nominal awardyou may return a verdict for the plaintiff in some nominal amount such as one dollar. Second, it was unnecessary, for the reasons we shall elaborate upon in the next section of this opinion. In that section, we discuss the refusal of a nominal damage instruction offered by a media defendant which made a contention in support of the instruction similar to that made by The Gazette and which relied on the same case authority cited by The Gazette. Finally, the newspaper argues the verdicts of $30,000, $10,000, and $10,000, respectively, are excessive in amount, relying on general statements from our cases which set forth criteria for determining excessiveness. In the main damage instruction, Instruction 11, the trial court permitted the jury to consider, in determining the amount of the awards, the circumstances surrounding the statement, the occasion on which it was made and the extent of the publication, the nature and character of the insult, the probable effect on those who heard the statement, and its probable effect upon the respective plaintiffs' personal feelings and upon [their] standing in the community and in business. The instruction authorized the jury to compensate the plaintiffs for insult, including pain, embarrassment, humiliation, and mental suffering; injury to reputation; and, in the case of Mr. Harris, any monetary loss, including medical expenses, caused by the publication. The focus of the defendant's excessiveness argument is upon the alleged failure of proof to support, in defendant's words, injury to business. The newspaper asserts that Mr. Harris was not employed and was not seeking employment, that the record does not reflect whether Mrs. Harris was employed, and that Mrs. Sweeney had merely failed to receive a pay raise following the incident. This is actually an insufficiency-of-the-evidence argument. We will take no further notice of this contention dealing with injury to plaintiffs' business because defendant failed to object to that portion of Instruction 11 which permitted the jury to assess an amount on account of such a loss. The sole objection by defendant to Instruction 11 was that there is no evidence of any damage to the reputation of any plaintiff. Because defendant did not object below to the business loss reference in the instruction, on the ground of insufficiency of the evidence to support such an item, the defendant will not be permitted to rely on such ground on appeal. See Rule 5:21. The basis for such a ruling is obvious. If the argument made on appeal had been made to the trial judge, the court would have had the opportunity to consider the question and the instruction could have been amended by deleting the reference to business loss, assuming the defendant's contention is correct. The balance of defendant's excessiveness argument suffers from the same deficiency. The newspaper now contends there was no competent evidence to support the plaintiffs' alleged emotional injuries, asserting the plaintiffs offered only vague generalizations and conclusory, self-serving opinions.... Continuing, the defendant argues: These statements of opinion or conclusionutterly lacking a factual basiscannot meet the standards... of competent evidence of actual injury. This, too, is an argument that the evidence was insufficient to support a finding that the plaintiffs suffered mental distress; it is not a true excessiveness argument. This contention should have been made to the trial court in opposition to the pertinent elements of Instruction 11. It was not. Consequently, for the reasons already assigned, such contention will not be noticed for the first time on appeal under the guise of an argument that the verdicts are excessive. The judgments in favor of the plaintiffs will, therefore, be affirmed.