C. Court Favors Media in Civil Liability Case as Columbine Families Sue

     At a time of growing concern about risks that may await news and entertainment media that disseminate “violent” material, special attention had been paid to the suit against Oliver Stone and others who produced and distributed the film “Natural Born Killers.”  The case resulted from a brutal killing spree in Mississippi and Louisiana committed by two teen-agers who had recently seen the movie, and who had allegedly been inspired by it to commit savage murders.  One of the persons they attacked was Patsy Byers, a store clerk in rural Louisiana, who brought suit against Time Warner and its subsidiaries, and named Stone as an individual defendant.

     The trial court concluded that “the law simply does not recognize a cause of action such as that presented” by this suit, and thus dismissed the complaint.  The state court of appeals, however, took a very different view and sent the case back for trial.  The appeals panel ruled that Ms. Byers should have a chance to show that the film producers owed her a legal duty, which they had breached, and that they had acted with a degree of intent to inflict harm upon innocent victims sufficient to warrant a damage award.  Byers v. Edmondson, 712 So.2d 681 (La. App. 1998).  The Louisiana and United States supreme courts both declined to intervene at this early stage in the litigation.  The case thus went back to the trial judge who had originally dismissed it.

     Just as the entertainment community was preparing for the worst, in March 2001 the trial court granted summary judgment on the merits to all of the media defendants, holding that they simply could not establish the level of intent needed to sustain a damage award.  Even if they succeeded in meeting that burden, added the trial judge, any resulting judgment would be incompatible with the First Amendment.  One might observe, however, that the state court of appeals seemed already to have anticipated that issue, and to have resolved it rather differently.  Thus Oliver Stone, Time Warner, and the other media defendants were dropped from the case, which remained alive only with respect to the insurer of one of the killer’s families.

     The other recent and relevant development suggests we have surely not heard the last on this complex subject.  At the end of April 2001, several families whose members were among those killed in the massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School filed suit in federal court against 25 entertainment companies, including Nintendo and Sony Entertainment.  The suit seeks $5 billion in damages, and claims that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the perpetrators of the massacre, had been influenced by certain violent video games to a degree for which the games’ makers and distributors were legally culpable.  The complaint specifically alleges that, had it not been for “the combination of the violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games, and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred.”

     This suit is not without precedent.  After a 1997 school yard shooting in Paducah, Ky., the families of three of the young victims filed a similar claim in federal court.  A district judge dismissed that claim, both on state tort law and First Amendment grounds, and no appeal was taken.  James v. Meow Media, Inc., 90 F. Supp. 2d 798 (W.D. Ky. 2000). 

     The focus of the Paducah suit was slightly broader than the Columbine case, including a claim that one scene from the film “Basketball Diaries” may have influenced the young killer.  The odds may have disfavored the Paducah plaintiffs in other ways; Kentucky law on product liability is unusually hostile to such claims, and the judge who ruled on the case was reputed to be unreceptive to imposing civil liability on corporate defendants. 

     Nonetheless, the court in the Columbine action reached a similar result.  On March 5, 2002, the court dismissed the Columbine suit against the media defendants, ruling that the allegations, even if proved, would not warrant recovery or the imposition of liability under the circumstances of the case.  It is not yet clear whether an appeal will follow.

     Finally, a Chicago judge recently ruled that ethnic stereotypes that may be offensive to some viewers of the HBO series “The Sopranos” offer no grounds for legal recourse.  The suit was brought by the American Italian Defense Association, and claimed that HBO’s sinister portrayals of persons of Italian ancestry violate the “individual dignity” provision of the Illinois Constitution.    

     The organization sought a declaration that the program violated the constitutional guarantee, but did not ask money damages or an injunction.  Ironically, the very provision the group invoked had received the U.S. Supreme Court’s blessing a half century ago in Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250 (1952), as applied to fliers distributed in the Chicago area by a white-supremacist group.  But the trial judge, ruling in September 2001, rejected any attempt to hold HBO legally liable.  “The aria,” he wrote, “may be offensive to Verdi, but The Sopranos have the constitutional right to sing.”

-- Robert M. O’Neil