WASHINGTON – St. Mary’s County has settled a lawsuit brought by the publisher of a local newspaper who said county officials conspired to suppress distribution of his paper on the eve of the 1998 elections.
The county’s insurance trust fund paid St. Mary’s Today publisher Ken Rossignol $425,000 to end the suit over the November 1998 “newspaper caper” and St. Mary’s County State’s Attorney Richard Fritz is paying another $10,000 himself, according to Rossignol’s attorney.
The attorney, Ashley Kissinger, said Rossignol was “extremely pleased” with the settlement. The outcome of the case “reaffirms the right of each citizen to speak freely of government and to choose what he or she wishes to red about public officials and candidates,” she said.
Fritz and then-Sheriff Richard Voorhaar were both running for office in 1998 when a group of off-duty sheriff’s deputies and civilians rode around the county on the eve of the election buying up all the copies they could of St. Mary’s Today, just as the paper hit the stands.
Court records say the Election Day issue carried a front-page headline that said “Fritz Guilty of Rape” and reported details of his guilty plea in 1965 to carnal knowledge, when he was 18, of a 15-year-old girl.
The court said Voorhaar and Fritz supported and participated in the plan, which ended at 7 a.m. on Election Day after deputies had visited about 40 stores and 40 newsboxes, gathering up 1,600 of the 6,500 papers printed that day.
Rossignol sued. But a federal district judge ruled in February 2002 that the deputies and county officials were acting as private citizens when they organized and carried out the newspaper roundup and did not, therefore, violate Rossignol’s civil rights “under color of state law.”
But a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision nearly a year later in a sharply worded opinion.
“It was not for law enforcement to summon the organized force of the sheriff’s office to the cause of censorship,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the published opinion.
The deputies were on “errands of suppression” when they bought up the newspapers, and were acting in their official capacities that night, Wilkinson wrote.
Calls Wednesday to Fritz, the county sheriff’s department and the county commissioners’ office were not returned. Attorneys for the deputies and for Voorhaar — who is no longer sheriff — also did not respond to calls seeking comment.
But the decision was hailed by the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, one of several press groups that filed briefs supporting Rossignol’s lawsuit.
“I think that’s a very important cautionary tale to any public official who thinks they can interfere with the public’s right to get information,” said Lucy Dalglish of the reporters committee. “I’m surprised it took this long.”
The defendants unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court and in 2004 the district court, taking up the case again, denied the defendants’ claims of immunity. An appeal by the deputies of that ruling was still pending in court when the settlement was reached Tuesday, effectively ending the case.
Dalglish said the case will affect more than just free-speech rights.
“The taxpayers out there should be paying attention to the fact that one of their public employees cost them this much money,” she said.
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