An Arkansas judge may have given too much weight to a press release in dismissing the libel lawsuit of a man who alleged that Dixie Chicks member Natalie Maines implicated him in the murders of three boys.

Natalie Maines

The “actual malice” standard for libel is a murky one, requiring a finding that a defendant made a statement with knowledge it was false or with “reckless disregard” of whether it was false or not. “'Reckless disregard,' it is true, cannot be fully encompassed in one infallible definition,” the U.S. Supreme Court noted in St. Amant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. 727 (1968).

In the case against Maines, the issue was whether she showed malice in statements she made about Terry Hobbs in an open letter posted on the Dixie Chicks' website. The letter described new evidence from a habeas corpus petition “showing that Damien Echols was wrongfully convicted” in 1994 of killing three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark.

Hobbs alleged in his libel suit that the letter “taken as a whole, accused Plaintiff of committing the murder[s]” and Maines has admitted she never read the petition.

But U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller decided in favor of Maines last week, finding summary judgment was appropriate largely because she based her statements “almost word-for-word” on a press release about the petition which “was approved by Echols' defense attorneys.” She also used a document summarizing the new evidence in the Echols case.

“Hobbs admits that Pasdar [Maines's married name] relied heavily on the language from the summary and press release in drafting her letters to seek donations [for Echols], particularly in the letters’ post-script, which is nearly identical to the evidence highlights in the summary and in the press release,” Miller said in a Dec. 1 opinion.

He cited two cases -- St. Amant and Secrist v. Harkin, 874 F.2d 1244 (1989) -- in concluding that “Hobbs cannot establish actual malice.”

In St. Amant, the Supreme Court said a candidate for public office made allegations about a deputy sheriff in good faith in part because he relied on a sworn affidavit. The evidence of good faith in Secrist included financial reports filed under penalty of perjury by a politician's campaign committee.

Hobbs has questioned the accuracy of the Echols press release, taking exception, among other things, to an “evidence highlight” that said DNA tests “show that a hair belonging to Terry Hobbs, the step-father of one of the victims, was found in the ligature of one of the victims.”

The genetic sequence of a DNA sample taken from Hobbs, he said in a brief, differs from the sequence obtained from the hair and “That which differs is not a match, a fact which would have been apparent to Pasdar had she bothered to read the Echols [petition].”

That might be expecting too much of a lay person. As one media law blog has said of Miller's ruling, it “shows an admirable bit of pragmatism that helps to preserve the public's freedom to comment on highly contentious court proceedings without reading every last detail of often-voluminous filings.”

But Hobbs may have a decent argument for the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals (the same court which heard the Secrist case) that a press release -- even one approved by attorneys -- doesn't match up to a sworn affidavit or campaign finance reports as evidence that the publisher of an allegedly defamatory statement was not reckless.

“Pasdar is an advocate for one side of this dispute,” he said in another brief. “To permit her to claim a privilege to repeat lies told by the side she agrees with in a press release without even reading the [court] pleading is to permit both her and the lawyers for Damien Echols to lie without consequence. Such a result would not be justice in this case.”

By Matthew Heller
12/6/09