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Huckabee v. Time Warner Entertainment Co.5/4/2000
an elevated evidentiary standard for summary judgment is unworkable. Why, then, does the Court persist in its refusal to apply the plaintiff's proof standard to motions for summary judgment? Only two explanations suggest themselves. One is that the Court simply does not trust trial judges to apply the law. The other is that the Court believes that it is appropriate to put defendants in defamation cases to the burden and expense of trial even though the public-figure plaintiff cannot win. Neither of these explanations can justify the Court's decision.
III.
After rejecting an elevated evidentiary standard for plaintiff's response in this case to defendants' motion for summary judgment, the Court then assesses the evidence by what can only be an elevated standard. Not without a lengthy explanation can the Court conclude that the plaintiff failed to produce any evidence of actual malice. This was not evidence, the Court says, and neither was this, or this, or this, or even this, and certainly not this. Judge Huckabee's position, quite simply, is that given the conflicting evidence before him regarding the parents' conduct, his decision was justified, and since the defendants knew what that evidence was and acknowledged in their affidavits that it was important, they cannot have disregarded it without actual malice. I do not think Judge Huckabee's position is clear and convincing, given the several other sources the defendants consulted before airing their broadcast. But if every inference must be indulged in Judge Huckabee's favor, as with any other respondent to a motion for summary judgment, I do not see how the Court can conclude that Judge Huckabee has failed to produce more than a scintilla of evidence that the defendant acted with actual malice, thereby precluding summary judgment on that issue, as the trial court concluded.
Conspicuously, the Court does not conclude that the defendants' statements were substantially true - because, I think, the Court does not believe that. Rather, the Court concludes, even if some of the defendants' statements were not true and every inference is indulged in Judge Huckabee's favor, there is not a scintilla of evidence of actual malice. I do not find Judge Huckabee's evidence clear and convincing, but the Court's assessment of the record under an ordinary standard of proof is far from convincing.
I would remand the case to the court of appeals to consider the respondent's other arguments. Should they fail to persuade, that court should remand the case to the trial court for further proceedings.
Nathan L. Hecht Justice
Opinion delivered: May 4, 2000
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