--- http://www.calaware.org/news/weekly_detail.jsp?article_id=380 Issue Date: 2004-12-06 Volume: 1 Number: 34 SAN FRANCISCO, December 6 (CalAware) – Overruling its own 33-year-old privacy law decision, the California Supreme Court today held that the media are free to publicize facts from forgotten court cases. In Gates v. Discovery Communications, case no. S115008, the court unanimously ruled that there can be no invasion of privacy liability for publishing or otherwise disseminating facts from the record of a prior judicial proceeding, no matter how old the case, no matter how arbitrary the disclosure, and no matter how much anguish the resurrection of the information causes to those freshly exposed. The plaintiff, Steve Gates, served 17 months in prison, reduced for good behavior from a three year sentence, ending in 1995. His offense was as an accessory after the fact in a hitman-for-hire slaying of a car salesman in 1988. Gates, with no prior criminal record, was assistant manager of the Pomona auto dealership whose owner was convicted of ordering the killing to prevent the victim from proceeding with a class action lawsuit against the owner’s father, who owned another dealership. It took police years to convict the dealer, in part because Gates initially refused to testify about him. He eventually did, but then said he had kept silent in fear for the lives of his wife and parents. The defendant media company produced a documentary aired on the Discovery Channel in 2001 that retold the story, using Gates’s name and photograph from the case records. The episode, titled “Deadly Commission,” was part of a series, “The Prosecutors,” that reconstructed past criminal investigations using interviews with principals and court documents. [...remainder snipped...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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