Idaho high court reverses ruling, upholds protection for news media
By The Associated Press
02.17.03
BOISE, Idaho — The Idaho Supreme Court has completely reversed itself, upholding constitutional protection from damage claims for a newspaper that published part of a 40-year-old court file that said — perhaps inaccurately — a man had a homosexual affair with his cousin.
The high court's Feb. 14 decision for The Idaho Statesman in Boise was unanimous and erased its unanimous June 21 decision against the newspaper to keep Fred Uranga's invasion-of-privacy claim alive.
Justice Daniel Eismann, writing for the court, held that there is no invasion of privacy by the publication of information from a court record that is open to the public, no matter how old that record is.
"There is no indication," Eismann wrote, "that the First Amendment provides less protection to historians than to those reporting current events."
"Uranga has not offered any standard by which to determine when a court record is too old or a particular fact in such record too insignificant for its publication to merit First Amendment protection," he wrote.
Eismann was joined in the ruling by Justice Jesse Walters and Judges Roger Burdick, Gerald Weston and Randy Smith. Burdick, Weston and Smith sat in for Chief Justice Linda Copple Trout and Justices Wayne Kidwell and Gerald Schroeder.
Trout, joined by Kidwell, Walters, Eismann and Burdick, had written the June 21 opinion that supported Uranga. Schroeder did not participate in either ruling.
Uranga sued after the newspaper's 1995 publication of a story recounting the 1955 Boys of Boise homosexuality scandal. The paper included a photograph of a handwritten statement by one of the men eventually convicted. Melvin Dir's statement said he had an affair with a man who later killed himself because of the scandal. Dir's statement also said he had an affair with his cousin. Fred Uranga was the cousin, but Uranga's name never appeared in the story.
The district and appellate courts threw out Uranga's claim, citing First Amendment protections. But the original Supreme Court decision rejected that conclusion and ordered a hearing on the legitimacy of his allegations.
Trout concluded that the news media responsibility to make the public aware of court activity was not compromised by denying absolute privilege to published material only tangentially related to a 40-year-old case.
Carolyn Washburn, the Statesman's executive editor, called the court's change of heart incredible.
"It was comforting to know that the media or anyone else in the public who uses public records can have comfort in using what is in the public domain," Washburn said. "The media are not the only ones who use public records."
Uranga did not respond to telephone messages for comment.
The 1995 story on what the newspaper called one of the nation's "most infamous homosexual witch hunts" was published in the midst a statewide debate over a proposed ballot initiative banning state or local laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination. The paper called the 1955 scandal a cautionary tale.
Claiming the information in the statement was false and had never been introduced in any proceeding as evidence, Uranga demanded a correction. The Statesman declined, offering instead either to publish Uranga's rebuttal or explain his position along with a statement that the newspaper had no opinion on the truth of the court document.
Uranga declined both and sued.
The state high court found no distinction between the Uranga case and U.S. Supreme Court cases cited by the Statesman as protecting publication of material from court records open to the public.
"The examination of a public court record cannot be the basis of a claim for invasion of privacy by intrusion," the 10-page ruling determined.