Posted below is Aaron Carico's recent article in C-Ville Weekly entitled "The $10 million principle of the thing After tears, jeers and more tears, WVIR is ordered to pay up for its cracked reporting". The boxed notes in the story are my own.

For more, see the Index for Defamation Suit Against WVIR as Covered on Loper Website.

"The three-day defamation trial of Jesse Sheckler versus local NBC affiliateWVIR-29 encompassed equal parts Harper Lee, 'Law and Order' and 'Days of Our Lives.' A portly, bow-tied judge named Hogshire presided over the case in the City Courthouse. Attorney Thomas Albro and the WVIR defendants formed a right angle of dark, synthetic suits, gold jewelry and meticulously coiffed manes. Marked by a shelf of silver hair and a spare frame, Sheckler¹s lawyer Matthew Murray looked the part of an aging Atticus Finch, wielding righteous anger and aphorisms.

'Thirty-some years of my ambition to make something out of my life has been destroyed,' Sheckler wrote in court documents prior to the trial. 'I have suffered so much mental anguish over this I don't know how I stay alive.' On Friday, May 23, a City Circuit Court jury vindicated his anguish and gave him a reason to live - more precisely, a $10 million award in compensatory damages.

A federal grand jury indicted Sheckler in March 2001 on one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine, although he was later acquitted. Novice reporter Melinda Semadeni of WVIR covered the indictment and falsely claimed, 'DEA and JADE forces had confiscated 50 grams of crack cocaine and 500 grams of powder cocaine in a March 2001 raid on the home and business of Jesse Sheckler.' This single, erroneous sentence formed the crux of the multi-million dollar suit.

Sheckler alleges that WVIR's report laid financial waste to his eponymous garage and used car business in Stanardsville and, according to his psychiatrist, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. WVIR counters that broadcasts of Sheckler¹s drug indictment, regardless of factual errors, would have had the same effect on his reputation and livelihood and, further, that a link between their broadcasts and the plaintiff¹s ailments cannot be proven. News of the fabricated raid and drug confiscation aired on April 6 and 7 and again on October 29 and 30, 2001. No retraction has been issued, nor is one likely, since News Director Dave Cupp testified of one vague recollection in his 23 years at WVIR of issuing an on-air retraction.

The testimony of VCU mass communications professor Ted J. Smith opened Murray's case, and in it, Smith stated the most 'bone-chilling' call a newsroom can receive, short of contact from the FCC, is a lawyer's call regarding the facts in a story. Sheckler's criminal attorney in 2001, Denise Lunsford, would testify that she contacted WVIR about their errors. Murray made Smith's claim his refrain, repeating - and savoring - the word 'bone-chilling' almost hourly.

Murray pushed his next witnesses toward discrediting Semadeni. Her own video deposition rendered a barrage of equivocations, such as 'I don't recall' or 'I really don't recall' or 'I believe so.' The hedging abruptly stopped when she was asked where she obtained the drug bust information. She remembered distinctly, it seems, her lack of fault. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Pagel, she said. So the passing of the buck began.

Here's a brief outline of the buck's progress (don't forget your trail of bread crumbs): Denise Lunsford complained to Semadeni via telephone on April 7. When asked, Semadeni said Pagel was her source, but she referred Lunsford to Greene County reporter Nordia Higgins. Lunsford spoke to Higgins on April 9, but Higgins referred her back to Semadeni. Higgins and Semadeni exchanged e-mails. A WVIR employee passed a vague version of the complaint to News Director Dave Cupp, who then told Station Manager Harold Wright. Then, nothing from either side until March 2002.

Enter Attorney Benjamin Dick. Dick testified in a later deliberation, which the jury did not hear, that he called Wright in March 2002 representing Sheckler. Dick's inquiry into retraction elicited Wright's purported response, 'We're not interested in a retraction. Go ahead and sue. We've got the best lawyer money can buy, and we stand by our story.' Presumably, although he would not comment, Albro is seeking the best writ of appeal money can buy.

When Sheckler, a big man with rough hands and a pencil moustache, took the stand next, Murray asked him how he felt when he saw WVIR's report. Sheckler paused, bowed his head and, sobbing, replied, 'I fell to the floor.' News Director Dave Cupp appeared moved, reporters Nordia Higgins and Semadeni listened with a flat, almost smug, affect and reporter Pedro Echevarria appeared to be nodding off. The plaintiff wept profusely all three days.

'What did people say to you?' Murray asked.

'It¹s gotta be true. It's on TV,' Sheckler replied, and a later string of Greene County witnesses seemed to confirm his assertion.

Sheckler's wife and two daughters also testified through more tears.

'I don't go out at night,' his wife Becky said, crying, 'because I don't wanna see people looking at me.'

Albro's defense began with DEA agent Stan Burroughs, a man built like a linebacker. Burroughs arrested not only Sheckler, but also Sam Rose, to whom Sheckler loaned the $37,000 that brought his indictment. Convicted in October 2001, Rose drove lavish vehicles and made promises of lavish paybacks and - surprise! - dealt at least one kilo of cocaine per month. Burroughs said that Sheckler denied any financial relationship with Rose when confronted, telling him that anyone who made that claim 'was a liar.' Murray cross-examined Burroughs and, gathering his papers to finish, asked him, 'Sometimes you get the wrong man, don't you?'

'No,' Burroughs replied.

Leaning forward, Murray said, 'You still think he's guilty, don't you?'

'Guilty as sin,' he said.

Albro objected, the judge sought order and Sheckler's family gasped in disbelief.

To defend WVIR, Albro trumpeted erroneous reports regarding Sheckler's indictment printed in both the Greene County Record, a newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, and the Daily Progress, papers whose representatives claimed to have acquired their inaccurate information from Pagel as well. Neither print report contained the fabricated drug bust.

'Rumor was spreading like wildfire' about Sheckler's drug involvements, Record reporter Allen Browning testified.

In a coup de grace, Albro called Progress reporter Keri Schwab, who covered Sheckler's indictment on April 11, 2001. Earlier, the grave and hard-hitting Pagel, who drafted Sheckler's indictment, testified for the plaintiff that WVIR's Semadeni visited his office and sobbed. Semadeni swore she had never seen Pagel until his testimony. Schwab admitted that it was she who visited the Assistant US Attorney's office and broke down in tears. The confusion and mistaken identity seems to speak to a low official regard for the press: one reporter's the same as another.

Albro argued that Sheckler had an established history for his gastrointestinal problems, anxiety and depression and that his arrest and criminal trial caused most of the harm. His witness Dr. Bruce Cohen, a forensic psychiatrist, cited a litany of doctor's reports filled with diagnoses and treatments of the very ailments Sheckler said WVIR caused, but which inconveniently predated the broadcasts and seemed to be linked to the anxiety of his criminal trial.

Asked by Albro for his professional opinion of the broadcasts' direct harm to Sheckler, Cohen said with finality, 'It is my opinion that you can¹t come to an opinion.'

'Poison dropped into the edge of a pool will eventually kill all life in the pool,' Murray said in his closing argument, drawing a metaphor to the continuing effects of defamation that goes uncorrected.

'You wanna talk about stress?' asked Albro in his closing, in a nod to Cohen's testimony. 'Would you want Stan Burroughs and Bruce Pagel after you?' If a retraction would have solved everything, he told the jury, then Sheckler should have asked for one, but since he didn't, he deserved no compensation.

The jury disagreed.

'I wasn't surprised,' Murray told C-VILLE in a post-verdict interview. 'This man was terribly damaged by what 29 had broadcast.... Maybe $10 million is too low,' he mused. 'There is no price that can be placed on a man's reputation.'

To win compensatory damages, a plaintiff must prove negligence, defined as deviating from a common standard of practice, according to defamation expert Tom Spahn and a partner in the firm McGuireWoods.

'It's not uncommon for plaintiffs to win against media defendants,' Spahn told C-VILLE. 'It's very difficult to retain those on appeal. Nearly all of them are overturned. The appellate courts are more inclined in a First Amendment case to look at what happened, and most well-publicized verdicts are reversed and thrown out.'

'The money was not the issue,' Sheckler told C-VILLE. 'It was the issue, but not for me personally....'

Sheckler interprets his trial as a sort of crusade.

'It's gonna get in their pocketbook and sting the hell out of them,' he said of the $10 million award. 'If we destroy that...we haven't done our job...[and] I didn't do what God put me here to do.'

And if the jury had not found in his favor?

'It would have completely destroyed my life,' Sheckler said over the phone between tears. 'And I think I would have gone. I don't think I would have stayed here. Even though the case is over with, I still have all kinds of dreams, nightmares, can't sleep....'

Publishers, take note: This is not the last that will be heard from the suddenly lugubrious Sheckler.

'I'm gonna be writing a book about it. They definitely destroyed my life. It's a mess,' he said.'You see, I've got to live with that for the rest of my life. At least I've got a chance to live now, whereas before, I don't think I did.' " (Aaron Carico, C-Ville Weekly, June 3-9, 2003)