A $300,000 jury verdict recently awarded to a Louisiana Supreme Court justice who sued the Advocate, the state’s largest newspaper, for libel over an editorial has sparked concern among US press freedom advocates.
One legal expert said the ruling reflected a misunderstanding of a key legal principle that governs such cases, while another warned that the verdict could have a chilling effect on the media industry’s ability to report critically on powerful individuals and institutions.
George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, and Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, shared these concerns following the conclusion of the complex civil trial on 24 August. The case pitted Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Jefferson Davis Hughes III against the Advocate.
The judge maintained that a 2019 Advocate editorial, whose headline included the phrase “Jeff Hughes … made a mockery of justice,” libeled him. However, as a US public figure, Hughes bore the burden of proving “actual malice” on the part of the publication to succeed in his claim.
Freeman explained that actual malice occurs when a publisher harbors substantial doubts about a story’s veracity—or possesses a “conscious awareness” that it is likely false—yet proceeds with publication anyway.
Members of an Iberville Parish, Louisiana, jury that decided Hughes’s case heard testimony from two Advocate editors who stated that the outlet took every possible step to ensure the editorial’s accuracy and firmly believed it to be correct.
Ultimately, the entire dispute appeared to hinge on a discrepancy between the editorial in question and an investigative news story published two days earlier.
The investigative news story, produced jointly by the Advocate and CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana, quoted a woman who described seeking help for her son in 1998 during a custody dispute over his five-year-old son, Austin. She asked Hughes, then a lower court judge, to recuse himself from the case. The woman stated that she understood Hughes was romantically involved with a lawyer representing the opposing party, Berkley Durbin, but Hughes declined to step aside.
The news piece reported that Durbin withdrew from the case in August 1998, shortly before Hughes expanded custody rights for Austin’s mother. However, the subsequent editorial stated “in 1999 …” Hughes and Durbin were “romantically involved” and claimed that “Durbin represented Austin’s mother.”
Hughes subsequently filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Advocate, with him and his legal team arguing that the publication took an unreasonably long time to correct the timeline, damaged his reputation, and caused him significant emotional distress. The Advocate’s attorneys countered, among other arguments, that Hughes had failed to establish actual malice.
After approximately half an hour of deliberation, jurors indicated on the plaintiff’s verdict form that the “Advocate defamed Jeff Hughes.” However, the jury awarded him $9.7 million less than he had demanded, and the verdict form made no mention of actual malice.
Following the verdict, Kevin Hall, the Advocate’s president and publisher, issued a statement affirming, “We respect the jury’s decision … [and] stand by our journalism and remain committed to strong, independent reporting that serves our communities.”
An attorney representing Hughes told WWL Louisiana that “justice was served by the verdict,” which allowed the judge “to clear his name from this unfortunate defamation,” and emphasized that a substantial financial payout was never the objective.
This ruling represented the second significant blow to the US press in rapid succession. On 21 August, an Alabama jury awarded $9.25 million in damages against the New York Times for incorrectly reporting—based on an anonymous source familiar with the situation—that a college basketball player named Kai Spears had been present at the scene of a fatal shooting.
A notable factor in the Times case was that Spears, as a walk-on, or non-scholarship player, had been legally classified as a private individual rather than a public figure. This classification meant Spears could prevail if he convinced the jury that the Times’ information was false and published with negligence, as reported by the Washington Post.
The Times nonetheless issued a statement asserting that the Spears “verdict and award of damages are contrary to law and not supported by the facts.” The publication also noted that the Spears verdict marked the first defamation case the Times had lost in the United States in 50 years.
Both the Hughes and Spears verdicts are subject to appeal. It remained unclear whether the Advocate and the Times intended to pursue such action.
The Advocate reported on Tuesday that Louisiana’s judiciary commission had released misconduct charges against Hughes, accusing him of leveraging his office and political “campaign war chest to intimidate [the outlet], its attorney [Scott Sternberg] and a private citizen [whom the judge] sued over a letter she wrote to the newspaper.”
According to the Advocate, this misconduct case “is now the third against Hughes to come to public light.”
When asked to comment on the Hughes verdict and its potential implications for the actual malice standard, Stern stated on Monday that it “won’t improve journalism” to impose “significant monetary damages whenever the inevitable mistakes occur.”
“While [journalists] do their best to ensure that their sources and source materials are accurate, there is always a possibility that they aren’t,” Stern remarked. He added that this is precisely why the US Supreme Court has long held that journalists can only be held liable for defamation in cases involving public figures if they acted with “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of the truth.”
He cautioned that without this protection, a genuine “fear of liability” could cause publishers to become “more timid and suppress critical reporting of wealthy, powerful or otherwise newsworthy people.”
Meanwhile, Freeman expressed his belief that the Hughes verdict demonstrated how challenging it is to convey “what the actual malice standard requires.”
“In the mind of the publisher, you really need to believe the story is either not true or probably untrue—but you published anyhow,” Freeman explained. In the Hughes case, he asserted, “there is no evidence or line of proof” that such circumstances existed.
