Disturbing Court Decision in the US

For a good part of the 20th Century, the US set the international standards of press freedom due in large part to ground-breaking decisions by the country's courts.

And one of the fundamental principles those courts upheld time after time was the concept of "actual malice," meaning reckless disregard for the truth. In other words, a party seeking legal redress for a statement deemed as false had to prove that there was "actual malice" on the part of the defendant in order to get compensation.

But now we hear that an US appellate court, the US Court of Appeals in Boston, interpreting a 100-year-old law, has ruled that true statements can be libelous if published maliciously.

Here's from the website of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:

“It is the most dangerous libel decision in decades. The decision puts a crack in the bedrock that threatens to undermine free speech,” Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote on his blog.

It must be said that the parties involved in the case have nothing to do with the media, that it has to do with a disgruntled employee suing the employer that had just fired him.

The case involved a lawsuit brought by a former Staples employee against his employer. Alan Noonan sued Staples for libel after the company’s executive vice president sent an e-mail to 1,500 employees alerting them that Noonan had been fired for violating the company’s travel and expense policy.

Noonan acknowledged that everything written in the e-mail was true, but still claimed he had been libelled because it was sent with malicious intent.

In finding that a reasonable jury might find that the Staples e-mail was sent maliciously, the court pointed to a century-old Massachusetts statute that allows true statements to be considered libelous “if the plaintiff can show that the defendant acted with ‘actual malice’ in publishing the statement.” According to Ambrogi's blog, the Massachusetts statute was held unconstitutional by a 1998 state court decision.

The court held that the statute's use of the term ''actual malice" did not have the same meaning as the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of the term in the landmark First Amendment case New York Times v. Sullivan. Instead of interpreting actual malice to mean that the plaintiff acted with reckless disregard for the truth, as New York Times held, the Court of Appeals ruled that it means ill will or malevolent intent, a much lower standard for the plaintiff to prove.

“Though the Massachusetts statute at issue in this case also uses the term ‘actual malice,’ we are persuaded that we should not read that term as having the specialized meaning later developed by the Supreme Court,” Judge Juan Torruella wrote in the opinion.

It must also be noted that the decision did not rule that the case was libelous but that it must be presented to a jury. In any instance, it is extraordinary in the United States for such a relevant court, just one step short of the Supreme Court, to rule against exemplary jurisprudence that turned the US media into the model to be imitated by the rest of the democratic world.