New York Times v. Sullivan

Here is agreat description of why libel and slander is harmful:

"Telling lies about others
is as harmful as hitting them with an ax,
wounding them with a sword,
or shooting them with a sharp arrow."

Proverbs 25:18 (New Living Trans)

Here is an excerpt from an article written by David Hudson Jr.:

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
The case arose out of the backdrop of the civil rights movement. The New York Times published an editorial advertisement in 1960 titled "Heed Their Rising Voices" by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King. The full-page ad detailed abuses suffered by Southern black students at the hands of the police, particularly the police in Montgomery, Ala.

Two paragraphs in the advertisement contained factual errors. For example, the third paragraph read:

“In Montgomery, Alabama, after students sang 'My Country, Tis of Thee' on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school, and truckloads of police armed with shotguns and teargas ringed the Alabama State College Campus. When the entire student body protested to state authorities by refusing to re-register, their dining hall was padlocked in an attempt to starve them into submission.”

The paragraph contained undeniable errors. Nine students were expelled for demanding service at a lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse, not for singing 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' on the state Capitol steps. The police never padlocked the campus-dining hall. The police did not "ring" the college campus. In another paragraph, the ad stated that the police had arrested Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seven times. King had been arrested four times.

Even though he was not mentioned by name in the article, L.B. Sullivan, the city commissioner in charge of the police department, sued The New York Times and four black clergymen who were listed as the officers of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King.

Sullivan demanded a retraction from the Times, which it refused. The paper did print a retraction for Alabama Gov. John Patterson. After not receiving a retraction, Sullivan then sued the newspaper and the four clergymen for defamation in Alabama state court.

The trial judge submitted the case to the jury, charging them that the comments were "libelous per se" and not privileged. The judge instructed the jury that falsity and malice are presumed. He also said that the newspaper and the individual defendants could be held liable if the jury determined they had published the statements and that the statements were "of and concerning" Sullivan.

The jury awarded Sullivan $500,000. After this award was upheld by the Alabama appellate courts, The New York Times appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court reversed, finding that the "law applied by the Alabama courts is constitutionally deficient for failure to provide the safeguards for freedom of speech and of the press that are required by the First and Fourteenth Amendments in a libel action brought by a public official against critics of his official conduct."

For the first time, the Supreme Court ruled that "libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations," but must "be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment." In oft-cited language, the high court wrote:

“Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

The Court reasoned that "erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate" and that punishing critics of public officials for any factual errors would chill speech about matters of public interest. The high court established a rule for defamation cases that dominates modern-day American libel law. The Court wrote:

“The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice' — that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

The Court required a public official defamation plaintiff to show evidence of actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth by "convincing clarity" or clear and convincing evidence. This threshold has meant that many defamation defendants have stopped defamation suits before they go to a jury.