Constitutional Law

Ohio judge drops newspaper website-comments suit

By By The Associated Press

CLEVELAND ? An Ohio judge taken off a high-profile murder trial has dropped her $50 million lawsuit against a Cleveland newspaper and reached an undisclosed financial settlement with an affiliated company that runs the publication's website, an attorney said Dec. 31.

Cuyahoga County Judge Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and her adult daughter filed their lawsuit against The Plain Dealer, its parent company and the website operator in April over anonymous comments on the site that the newspaper said were traced to Saffold's personal e-mail.

The inflammatory comments concerned the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who has pleaded not guilty to charges in the killing of 11 women whose remains were found around his Cleveland home.

After the newspaper reported that the comments, including one critical of a Sowell attorney, had been connected to the judge, the defense team sought to have her removed from Sowell's case. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed to do so, saying her removal was needed to avoid the appearance of bias.

The judge denied posting the comments and said they came from her daughter, Sydney Saffold, using a joint family account.

The Saffolds sued, claiming that the defendants released confidential information in violation of the website privacy policy. The suit was dismissed Dec. 30, said Brian Spitz, an attorney for the judge and her daughter.

"We filed a suit that was for a very important cause and that my clients believed in very deeply and felt like fighting through until they got the resolution that they wanted," Spitz told the Associated Press. "At the end of the day, my clients were very happy."

Spitz said terms of the financial settlement with Advance Internet, the sister company that owns newspaper sites including The Plain Dealer's cleveland.com, were confidential.

One of the website comments at issue lumped Sowell, 51, with a man who killed his fiancee and another who killed his wife with cyanide. Another comment criticized one of Sowell's defense attorneys.

An online editor decided to track down the e-mail address associated with the comments without consulting anyone, The Plain Dealer had said. Advance Internet later blocked editors' access to the personal information of people who posted comments and said it never intended to make that information available to its affiliated newspapers.

"We take our users' privacy very seriously and believe our users should feel confident that private information shared with us will be protected," John Hassell, vice president of content at Advance Internet, told The Plain Dealer for a story published Dec. 31.

The Plain Dealer's editor, Debra Adams Simmons, said the newspaper was pleased to put the matter in the past.

"The credibility of the newspaper continues to rest on our ability to provide accurate, fair and objective news coverage. We believe that we have consistently done so," Simmons said.

Sowell's trial is scheduled to begin in February.

Full post as published by First Amendment Center on January 02, 2011 (boomark / email).