US top court rejects Boston Globe libel appeal

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court denied on
Monday an appeal by The Boston Globe and a former reporter
involving a $2.1 million jury award in a doctor’s libel lawsuit
over the newspaper’s coverage of a fatal experimental cancer
drug overdose in 1994.

Without comment or recorded dissent, the justices let stand
a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that upheld the
award to Dr. Lois Ayash, who said she had been wrongly blamed
in the paper for the overdose that led to the death of Globe
health columnist Betsy Lehman.

The Globe and reporter Richard Knox had refused to reveal
his confidential sources, despite an order from the judge in
the case.

The judge then issued a default judgment of liability for
Ayash on her claims of libel, defamation and infliction of
emotional distress. Default judgments are a sanction for
failure to perform a legally required duty.

Attorneys for the Globe, which is owned by the New York
Times Co., and for Knox appealed to the Supreme Court.

They said the ruling by the state’s highest court was wrong
in allowing a default judgment in a libel case brought by a
public figure, without requiring proof the information at issue
was false or had been published with actual malice.

They said the Supreme Court should use the case to clarify
whether and the extent to which the First Amendment guarantees
of freedom of speech and freedom of the press protect
confidential sources from disclosure in civil cases in general
and in libel cases by public figures in particular.

There have been a number of recent instances when reporters
have been ordered to disclose their confidential sources.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released last
week after spending 85 days in jail. She finally agreed to
testify before a federal grand jury investigating who in the
Bush administration leaked a covert CIA operative’s name to the
media.

And a U.S. appeals court in June found four journalists in
contempt for refusing to disclose the names of their sources in
the case of Wen Ho lee, the Los Alamos nuclear scientist once
suspected of espionage.

A number of news media companies and organizations
supported the Globe’s appeal. They said the Supreme Judicial
Court’s decision placed “longstanding journalistic values at
great risk” involving the use of confidential sources to report
on matters of public concern.

A jury had awarded $1.68 million against the Globe and
$420,000 against Knox, who now is employed by National Public
Radio.

The libel claim centered on a 1995 story by Knox that said
Ayash had countersigned an erroneous medical order that
resulted in Lehman’s death.

The newspaper later published a correction that Ayash had
not countersigned the overdose order, but it stood by its claim
that she was the leader of the team treating the 39-year-old
Lehman.

Another breast cancer patient at the Dana-Farber Cancer
Institute had mistakenly been given an overdose of the highly
toxic drug, but she survived.