Jackson Free Press

Interesting report in The Meridian Star today about the lawsuit by MBN officers against Frank Melton for releasing false accusations against them to The Clarion-Ledger in 2003 (the story originally broken by the Jackson Free Press). The judge has already declared summary judgement in the case against Melton because he lied under oath in court documents about passing the document to the newspaper. Now the judge is trying to decide whether Melton will have to pay the damages himself or whether the taxpayers will have to because he was a public official. The judge also issued a gag order in the case because a TV reporter asked a really stupid, uninformed question.

On Thursday, Bailey listened to defense motions for summary judgment filed by Melton and Buchanan.

Both motions argued that Melton's and Buchanan's actions with regard to the memo fell "within the scope and course of their employment" - and that they cannot be sued as individuals.

The Mississippi Tort Claims Act protects government employees from individual responsibility in a lawsuit. The act requires plaintiffs to sue a governmental entity instead.

There are, however, narrow exceptions to that rule; they occur when plaintiffs can prove government employees' actions constituted fraud, malice, libel, slander, defamation or any criminal offense.

It is this exception that the plaintiffs' attorneys are strenuously arguing. The apparent reason? Because the difference between suing individuals and suing the state can have a significant impact on the amount of damages awarded.

If Bailey rules that Melton and Buchanan acted within the course and scope of their jobs, the lawsuit will be litigated under the Mississippi Tort Claims Act - which has a cap on maximum damages. The state of Mississippi will be the defendant and Bailey will decide the verdict.

If the judge rules that the defendants' actions fall under one of the exceptions, a jury will render the verdict. Melton and Buchanan will be sued as individuals with no cap on damages. [...]

NOTES FROM THE HEARING

Television coverage: Thursday marked the the first time since the libel lawsuit against Melton was filed that television reporters attended a hearing. WTOK-Channel 11 and two Jackson stations, WAPT-Channel 16 and Channel WJTV-Channel 12, attended. One of the Jackson stations had asked Circuit Judge Robert Bailey to allow cameras inside the courtroom; Bailey denied the request because it was made less than 48 hours before the hearing.

The only print media in attendance was The Meridian Star.

Angry words: Dale Danks, a former mayor of Jackson and one of Melton's attorneys, asserted that Jackson television reporters were present because someone had told them Melton would be "placed in handcuffs and taken away" at the conclusion of the hearing. Danks seemed to imply the plaintiffs' side was responsible for the phone call - a remark to which the plaintiffs' attorneys took great offense. Melton, in fact, did not attend the hearing.

Gag order: Bailey granted the defense's request for a gag order over the objection of the plaintiffs' attorneys: "I can't see why either side would object to a gag order ... . I can't control the press, but I can control the attorneys and the parties." The judge's order does not attempt to restrict media coverage of the lawsuit; it does, however, forbid everyone involved in it from talking to reporters.

Jumping the gun: The Meridian Star's last story on the lawsuit asserted that Melton could not be sued as an individual under the Mississippi Tort Claims Act. While that may yet prove to be the case, the question formed the basis of Thursday's hearing, and the assumption was premature.

The Clarion-Ledger and the Gannett Corp. is also being sued in the case. For more articles on this, see the JFP's Frank Melton blog.

Previous Comments

ID

120354

Comment

...and the Clarion-Ledger was ...where? The Clarion-Ledger: Miss a day, miss... apparently very little...

Author

Rex

Date

2005-10-21T12:57:44-06:00

ID

120355

Comment

The Ledge ran an AP story today saying that Melton is trying to put off his damages for the faulty memo on the taxpayers. They final mention themselves -- very carefully. Also, notice how they say that the memo "questioned the actions" of the agents. (Read the memo yourself to see how "questioning" you think it is.) Excerpt from AP story in Ledge: A Lauderdale County judge will decide if former Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics director Frank Melton could be held personally liable for leaking a MBN investigative memo to a newspaper reporter. In August, Melton, now mayor of Jackson, said he lied for more than two years when he said he didn't release the information. Lauderdale County Circuit Court Judge Robert Bailey threw out Melton's response to the case, entering a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff's. The issue now, which attorneys battled about Thursday, is whether Melton was acting within the scope of his government position. If so, damages will be capped and the state will pay. If Melton is found personally liable, there will be no cap on damages. In April 2003, the internal MBN memo was given to a Gannett News Service reporter whose stories appear in The Clarion-Ledger. The Clarion-Ledger subsequently published a story based on its contents. The memo questioned the actions of a retired MBN agent, Robert Earl Pierce, and a current MBN agent, Jimmy Saxton, involving the use of government equipment and aircraft. Pierce and Saxton filed a lawsuit claiming the allegations were false and had caused them emotional distress. The lawsuit was expanded to include assertions of libel and invasion of privacy. Attorneys for Pierce and Saxton have asked Bailey to rule that Melton is legally liable for release of the memo and can be subject to damages.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T10:41:30-06:00

ID

120356

Comment

Oooo, this is fun. Notice the difference between the Clarion-Ledger version of the AP story and the version that appears in Biloxi's Sun-Herald (incidentally, the superior newspaper of the two). In the Ledge story, they get to themselves further down in the story, and they seem to be trying to distance the paper here from their corporate parent, Gannett News Service. Sun-Herald writes in third paragraph: "In April 2003, the internal MBN memo was given to a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, which subsequently published a story based on its contents." Clarion-Ledger reports in seventh paragraph: "In April 2003, the internal MBN memo was given to a Gannett News Service reporter whose stories appear in The Clarion-Ledger. The Clarion-Ledger subsequently published a story based on its contents." Also, note that they do not tell us that The Clarion-Ledger is also being sued. The Sun-Herald also gives a timetable on when Mr. Melton is due in court again: Bailey must decide if Melton acted within the course and scope of his job and is therefore protected by the law. If Bailey decides Melton's actions were not protected by state law, a trial, now tentatively scheduled for Nov. 7, will continue. The Clarion-Ledger does not.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T10:56:55-06:00

ID

120357

Comment

That's WEIRD. I thought it was pretty much a mandatory practice for papers to include a final paragraph stating any conflict of interest. Even CNN, if it does a story on Bugs Bunny's creator or something, will always conclude its online piece with something to the effect of "CNN is a subsidiary of Time Warner, which also owns the Warner Brothers franchise." "Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention: We're co-defendants in this case." The joys of being a monopoly, I guess. Screw your staff with nasty all-rights contracts, then simply choose not to bring up blatant conflicts of interest. Incredible. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-10-22T12:52:57-06:00

ID

120358

Comment

Interesting paragraph in the e-mail that New York Times editor Bill Keller wrote to his staff yesterday about they way they handled (bungled) Judy Miller's role int he Plame-gate affair. This seems appropos to a discussion of this Melton-Ledge entanglement in which The Clarion-Ledger is not telling readers the whole story of how they are, and were during the mayoral campaign, intertwined with Mr. Melton in this case: There is another important issue surfaced by this case: how we deal with the inherent conflict of writing about ourselves. This paper (and, indeed, this business) has had way too much experience of that over the past few years. Almost everyone we've heard from on the staff appreciates that once we had agreed as an institution to defend Judy's source, it would have been wrong to expose her source in the paper. Even if our reporters had learned that information through their own enterprise, our publication of it would have been seen by many readers as authoritative - as outing Judy's source in a backhanded way. Yet it is excruciating to withhold information of value to our readers, especially when rival publications are unconstrained. I don't yet see a clear-cut answer to this dilemma, but we've received some thoughtful suggestions from the staff, and it's one of the problems that we'll be wrestling with in the coming weeks.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T15:45:34-06:00

ID

120359

Comment

Another point I find curious: With all his money, why doesn't Mr. Melton just take responsibility and pay his fine rather than trying to put this off on Mississippi taxpayers?

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T15:47:27-06:00

ID

120360

Comment

That's an excellent question, and somebody should put it to Melton. Maybe the Meridian Star will; they seem to do an exceptional job of covering local Jackson events. Wish we had a local daily paper to do that. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-10-22T16:08:07-06:00

ID

120361

Comment

Yeah, me, too. The Clarion-Ledger, however, seems too busy covering their own a$$. Pardon my French. It does make one wonder why might have been -- that is, what might have been covered in the daily newspaper during the mayoral campaign had the candidate and the daily newspaper covering the candidate weren't wrapped up together in lawsuits over the same matter. Guess we'll never know.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T16:13:13-06:00

ID

120362

Comment

Also, Tom, I don't know if anybody will be able to ask Melton questions about this case, what with the judge's "gag order" now. Not that he was likely to answer anyway, but now he has an excuse not to. One thing I don't get, though: Did his attorneys (Danks et al) truly ask for and get a "gag order" in a civil case against a sitting mayor who lied in court documents (repeatedly) when he was serving the state as a narcotics director and now is trying to get the taxpayers to pay for it? Uh, this is a tailor-made case of why the public should have a huge interest in the case. He's our employee and did/is doing this stuff on the taxpayer's nickel. And he's trying to get the taxpayers to pay for this circus, not to mention the amount of company time he's going to spend in a courtroom, and has already. If the complaint was truly that some dumb-ass TV reporter asked if they were going to march him out of a civil courtroom in handcuffs, perhaps the quick answer is, "no, you idiot. This is a civil court." (The judge already said he's not bringing perjury charges.) Are there truly grounds for some "gag order"? We will be exploring this question further, so stay tuned. All that said, and as our attorney pointed out to me, perhaps there is a good reason that we're not aware of that the judge saw the need for such an order. So, the jury's still out, so to speak. But these are curious questions.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T17:08:58-06:00

ID

120363

Comment

Yeah. Though I do sit and stew sometimes about how I would have done things differently if I had been in charge of Johnson's campaign. Fear of crime was a big, perennial issue, and I can't help but think that if Johnson had started his campaign with a flurry of ads with Joey Bruckheimer type music in the background, portraying his police force as if they were a bunch of Rambo types, and citing the decreasing crime rate in various categories, he'd be talking about his third term agenda right now. Of course, if the C-L didn't sell papers on the fear of crime, we might have had a more substantive campaign. It all does seem to cycle back to the media in the end. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-10-22T17:11:55-06:00

ID

120364

Comment

And I agree: The Meridian Star is putting The Clarion-Ledger to absolute shame on this story. I'm not sure I've read a single story in the Ledge in the last three years that compare to the Star's coverage of this one case so far. It feels like it's written (and/or edited) by a grown-up reporter, not a high-schooler. Sorry, but the truth hurts, and the truth is that The Clarion-Ledger's reporting seems to get worse by the week ... and not just the stuff they don't want to tell us about because they're wrapped in it. They run some good photos, though, and Marshall Ramsey rocks, except when he bases a cartoon on bad reporting in the paper.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T17:12:07-06:00

ID

120365

Comment

Jerry Bruckheimer, rather. I don't know who Joey Bruckheimer is, but if he's a polka star, then I definitely achieved the wrong effect. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-10-22T17:12:35-06:00

ID

120366

Comment

Very curious questions indeed, Donna. Is it just me, or does there seem to be an awful lot of courtroom drama going around these days? I swear, if this keeps up I think we're going to run out of incumbents. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-10-22T17:18:49-06:00

ID

120367

Comment

So much cycles back to the media in the end ... like the selling of Bush as a moderate "compassionate conservative" when Mr. Olasky's phrase means a conservatism that is anything but moderate. But, back to Jackson, frankly, all evidence showed that Mr. Melton was presenting nothing to show that he was qualified to be mayor and run the city. He's OK at sound bites, but hey. And he might be great with kids; indications point that way. He has some good ideas. But running a city? Not so much. The media should have told us this, just like The New York Times should have told us back in February 2003 that the WMD rationale for the war was a myth. But this isn't how corporate media work these days; they want to please their most likely big advertisers even as they may be losing readership and/or viewers by doing it. And now we are seeing just how co-dependent Melton and the Ledge were throughout the campaign with these twin lawsuits with outcomes that depend on each other's depositions and, wow, it's kinda mind-boggling to consider just why the reports about him were so glowing. It's certainly a context that the public has the right to know about. Meantime, until we did our stories about the lawsuits, it was like a media blackout on it. Good for WAPT for picking up that Meridian Star story a couple months back when the judge nailed Melton for lying to the court. If not, I truly don't believe any Jackson media outlet would have covered it. Media over all in this country has gone to hell, but we truly have the most timid I've ever seen in this state. Even in Colorado Springs, reporters would ask real questions of elected officials. Agreed that Mayor Johnson's campaign was lacking. But he was also campaigning against the media and some very stupid crime rhetoric -- from Melton's bosom buddies at WLBT to his fellow defendants at the Ledge. So I don't know how anything of use was going to break through. It was like a set-up, no matter what he did. WJTV seems utterly useless for anything, and WAPT has its moments, but it sure didn't step up and do adult journalism during the mayoral campaign. I hope they make up for it, but that goofy-ass story they did last week, interviewing the police chief about the national murder rates didn't give me much faith. Lord have mercy. I felt sorry for Shirlene for having to deal with such stupid questions about the time before her tenure, but then I got miffed at her for lying, purposefully or not, about crime going up in Jackson during the time that the Crime Prevention Unit was in place. That was an absurd statement; I've been meaning to throw that report in Truthwatch, but I've been hot and heavy on the national corporate-looting crowd the last few days, so no time. Anyway, we're about to head to Del Sol to celebrate Haley's birthday. No, he wasn't invited.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-22T17:26:35-06:00

ID

120368

Comment

The New York Times public editor (that is, ombudsman, which The Clarion-Ledger needs more than ever with this Melton-MBN problem hanging over their hands) weighed in today on the Judy Miller mess. This quote seems to go nicely on this thread about our local little media cover-up: "By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes," Mr. Keller wrote Wednesday in response to questions I had asked, "I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the W.M.D. boil earlier, I suspect our critics - at least the honest ones - might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of the reporter above the duty to its readers." Mr. Keller is right. The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner. It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn't get a fair shake. Full piece

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-10-23T12:22:16-06:00

ID

120369

Comment

I can halfway believe the CL wouldn't be commenting outside of bare minimums, if only because they're also involved. But it's going to be a shock to the people of Jackson when they have to foot this bill.

Author

Ironghost

Date

2005-10-23T21:09:07-06:00

ID

120370

Comment

You know it's sad how Melton pulled the wool over our eyes with him great promises that he would "solve the crime problem in ninety days"., how he wanted "the most qualified person with a passion for the job" as Fire Chief of Jackson. In his inaugaration speech he promised how he would put Jackson's youth back on track. Well, first of all, the mayor's job is not to ride around trying to play poilce officer. He wants to give the illusion that he is an officer by wearing a badge. This is something that would probably anyone else in jail for impersonating an officer. PLEASE, let the real officers do thier job. Give them the means and support that they so desperately need to keep criminals off the streets. Secondly, how could he have appointed a firefighter as Fire Chief that does not offer his qualifications to the media and the general public? Isn't this the same firefighter that was a very prominent figure within the Local Union that has, in the past sued the city and fought against equality among firefighters? What happened to the selective process of apointnemt? Why not let the firefighters vote as a whole on who they prefer as their leader? Finally, how can Melton, in all of his infinite wisdom, talk about putting our youth back on track, turn right around and do television interviews about fighting crime with a baseball cap on his head, turned around backwards, just like the "youth" that he is trying to teach the right way? Mayby I am just old fashioned, but should we lead by example? How can the youth believe in a man that has confessed that he lied about an issue that happened when he was in charge at MBN? srj101

Author

rufus

Date

2005-10-23T22:40:41-06:00

ID

120371

Comment

I wonder what Gov. Musgrove thinks of this case? Who does he think should pay since he appointed Melton in the first place? A reaction to the impending settlement from Barbour and our local state rep's would be nice! Who do they think should pay - us or him?

Author

pikersam

Date

2005-10-24T14:20:54-06:00