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NEW YORK TIMES vs.

SULLIVAN

Facts:

On March 29, 1960, The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement titled "Heed Their
Rising Voices", paid for by the "Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for
Freedom in the South". The advertisement described actions against civil rights protesters, some
of them inaccurately, some of which involved the police force of Montgomery, Alabama.
Referring to the Alabama State Police, the advertisement stated: "They have arrested [King]
seven times..." However, at that point he had been arrested four times. Although the
Montgomery Public Safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, was not named in the advertisement,
the inaccurate criticism of actions by the police was considered defamatory to Sullivan as well,
due to his duty to supervise the police department.

During that time, Alabama law denied a public officer recovery of punitive damages in a libel
action concerning their official conduct unless they first made a written demand for a public
retraction and the defendant failed or refused to comply, so Sullivan sent such a request.

The Times did not publish a retraction in response to the demand. Instead its lawyers wrote a
letter stating they were somewhat puzzled as to how Sullivan thought the statements reflect him.

Then, they asked Sullivan to point out the statements that pertained to him, to which Sullivan did
not respond but instead filed a libel suit a few days later, which he won in the lower court.

Issue:

Whether the New York Times was guilty of Libel?

Held:

No. The rule of law applied by the Alabama courts was found constitutionally deficient for
failure to provide safeguards for freedom of speech and of the press, as required by the First and
Fourteenth Amendment. The decision further held that even with the proper safeguards, the
evidence presented in this case was insufficient to support a judgment for Sullivan. In sum the
court ruled that "the First Amendment protects the publication of all statements, even false ones,
about the conduct of public officials except when statements are made with actual malice.

In this legal context, the phrase refers to knowledge or reckless lack of investigation, rather than
its ordinary meaning of malicious intent. In his concurring opinion, Justice Black explained that
"'[m]alice,' even as defined by the Court, is an elusive, abstract concept, hard to prove and hard
to disprove. The requirement that malice be proved provides at best an evanescent protection for
the right critically to discuss public affairs and certainly does not measure up to the sturdy
safeguard embodied in the First Amendment.

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