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Jury Awards $11 Million for Internet Defamation
dptalia writes "A woman in Florida has been awarded $11.3 million dollars in a defamation case. Apparently the defendant was unhappy with the plaintiff's referral service and posted complaints all over the internet. In a chilling slap at free speech, the jury decided that not only was this illegal, but that it was worth over $11 million. The defendant can't pay the judgement — she can't even pay for an attorney. The plaintiff says she doesn't care, but sued for the principle of the thing."
Today's Lesson: If you can sue someone in your home state, who can't even afford a lawyer and is out of reach due to natural disaster, you too can win really big judgements!
Seems Ms. Sheff is no stranger to trashing others on web sites.
if you can't say something nice... sue.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
While it's true that slander/libel are not protected by the 1st Amendment, that's pretty irrelevant to what happened here. According to TFA, the defendant never showed up to offer a defense. The judge, without any other way to go, found a default judgment for the plaintiff. Only at this point was a jury called, and then only to determine damages. If you're a juror, and one attorney tells you, "In my long experience, this sort of pain and suffering (or whatever) is worth $11 million", and no one is there to tell you otherwise, there's a good chance you'll find $11 million in damages. Whether it actually was slander or libel doesn't matter. If there's no defense, the defense loses, regardless of the actual facts. Damned inactivist judges...
It turns out the defendant had her house flooded by Hurricane Katrina and had to leave... the legal notices that the plaintiff was required to send bounced back to the plaintiff and were never received. The defendant didn't show because she wasn't aware of when the trial was. Nor did she have enough money to hire a lawyer. So, odds are, had the case actually been defended, this thing would've either been thrown out or reached a defense verdict.
I'm just suprised that the judge didn't reduce the jury's damages... that said, because the defendant had no money for an attorney, it seems unlikely that this will be appealed (which it should be).
Not quite. Any public figure, included a politician, has a high bar to prove defamation under the New York Times v. Sullivan standards, which require a showing of actual malice as well as falsity. But that's not absolute license to print anything you want regardless of truth.
Chosing not to show up at all is throwing in the towel.
Actually, it stated in the article that she had to leave Louisiana when hurricane Katrina hit and never got the court documents with the date to show up. They were returned by the postal service to the plaintiff's lawyer in Florida.
So, apparently, the reason she didn't show up was not because she couldn't get an attourney. It was because she never got the summons.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
This seems to all have come out of a set of disputes over how to deal with troubled kids that led to them being placed in a school that is part of a group that has a long trail of allegations and convictions for child abuse.
Sue Scheff's site is here: http://www.helpyourteens.com/index.html
A google for "WWASP" and "PURE" "Sue Scheff" gives interesting information.
The original thread and allegations are here.
Members of that board don't have anything particularly nice to say about this event.
From TFA:
"Bock says that when she moved back to her repaired house over the summer, she knew the trial was approaching but did not know the date. She says she doesn't have the money to pay the judgment or hire a lawyer to appeal it. She adds that if the goal of Scheff's lawsuit was to stifle what Bock says online, it worked."
Bock is the Defendant and Scheff is the plaintiff. Bock basically was in Louisiana when Katrina hit and had to evacuate. When she got some of her lift back on track, it looks like she just say "awww fuck it, my life is turned upside-down, I can't deal with this" and simply let it go. Bock didn't even show up for the trial and had to let go of her lawyer!
If you make no effort to show up for a trial in order to present a defense, then you will lose by default. Scheff won essentially on a technicality, not the facts of the case. I took a prior landlord to court once and he lost because he didn't show up for trial. The Judge ruled in favor of him simply because he didn't show up, and didn't even bother to look at the facts of the case. You have to show up to defend yourself or you are in contempt of court. The reason why the judgement was so large was probably because that was the maximum Scheff asked for or could get, and with no one to defend the outcome, no one was there to defend the penalty either!
Here's more details from the article:
Scheff, who operates a referral service called Parents Universal Resource Experts, says she referred Bock to a consultant who helped Bock retrieve her sons. Afterward, Bock became critical of Scheff and posted negative messages about her on the Internet site Fornits.com, where parents with children in boarding schools for troubled teens confer with one another.
Basically we make a jump from Scheff providing services to help Bock to Bock becoming critical of Scheff, with no facts in between as to why. I can't blame the author of the article because she's not reporting on a violation of free speech, jus the facts of the case. I also can't judge if she was able to obtain why Bock was critical and what comments she made and where. Obviously the submitter of this article wanted to stir up he "Slander is not free speech" crowd, and succeeded in doing so, but you can't go that far unless you know more about what Bock said and what Scheff did to make Bock say those things.
Scheff won on a technicality due to natural disaster. Winning on a technicality is not news, except for USA today, which never has any decent articles. This is one of the biggest stretches I've ever seen on slashdot. Maybe I should sue the editors and submitter for letting bullshit like this get on slashdot.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Contrary to popular opinion, lawyers don't run around filing lawsuits in their own names. They have clients. Clients are the ones who decide whether or not to sue. Might as well blame the post office for delivering junk mail. Maybe the problem isn't with lawyers, but with the people who hire them.