"Melinda Semadeni had a minute and a half to fill. It was April 6, 2001, a Friday, and the twenty-six-year-old reporter at WVIR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, needed a story. At the morning news meeting, someone mentioned Jesse Sheckler.

Sheckler, the forty-nine-year-old owner of a successful garage in nearby Greene County, had been indicted a month earlier along with four other men on a charge of conspiracy to possess cocaine. The Greene County Record, a 3,200-circulation weekly in Stanardsville, the county's only incorporated town, had reported the charges the day before. Reporters in nearby Charlottesville, the largest city in central Virginia with a population of about 45,000, made a habit of watching the Record for tips. Semadeni was assigned to the story.

She could not have known it, but a slow spiral had begun in which a series of mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities would tarnish a young reporter's career, send an innocent man into an emotional tailspin, and produce the largest libel award in Virginia history. The media crowd in this small southern city is still wondering how a straightforward news story became a journalistic cautionary tale.

Home to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville has an affluent, educated population that cares about local news, and WVIR/Channel 29 has a reputation as a stepping-stone for beginners.

Semadeni had been working at Channel 29 for three months, her first paid reporting job out of Brigham Young University. On this Friday, assignment in hand, she headed north on U.S. 29 to Stanardsville, only a forty-minute drive from Charlottesville - though the psychological distance is much greater. If Charlottesville is known for its liberal eccentricity, its laid-back downtown sprinkled with restaurants and coffee shops, Greene County is the polar opposite. Its longtime residents are conservative, with a distrust of outsiders that goes back generations.

Around the same time that Semadeni was driving to Greene County, Jesse Sheckler was on the phone with his attorney. He believed he would be acquitted as soon as the jury heard his side — that he had been hoodwinked into making what he thought was an innocent loan to a friend.

When Semadeni got to Stanardsville, she spoke to residents who were surprised at the news of Sheckler's arrest. He was a good man, they said, who had done a lot for the people of the county. It was late in the day when she drove back to Charlottesville and telephoned Bruce Pagel, the federal prosecutor in charge of Sheckler's case. After a short conversation about the charges, she hung up. At 5 p.m. her story led the newscast.

Anchor Luke Duecy told viewers of a drug bust in Greene County: "Our Melinda Semadeni just returned from that county and has the very latest." Semadeni read the names of the accused, Sheckler's first. Then, over video images of Sheckler's house and garage, she told viewers that federal and local drug agents had found fifty grams of crack cocaine and 500 grams of powder cocaine in March on Sheckler's property.

Thirty miles to the north, Jesse Sheckler was not prepared for this. He had been arrested, yes, but no law enforcement agents had even searched his property, much less confiscated any drugs. The story, it seemed to him, had been conjured out of thin air.

As the report ran again at six and eleven, and then twice the next morning, things only got worse for Sheckler. By Saturday morning, people were driving past his house, even turning around in his driveway, to get a look at the crime scene.

When Semadeni got to the office on Saturday, there was a voicemail waiting from Sheckler's lawyer, Denise Lunsford. Semadeni returned the call, and Lunsford was angry, saying that the story the night before was wrong. Semadeni defended her reporting, telling the attorney that she had heard about the search from Bruce Pagel, the federal prosecutor.

After Semadeni hung up, she didn't give the matter much thought. The story was not scheduled to run again, and Lunsford had never specifically asked for a correction. Besides, Greene County wasn't even Semadeni's regular beat. When she got off the phone, Semadeni wrote an e-mail to Nordia Higgins, the reporter who usually covered Greene for the station. Higgins would likely be the one doing any future reporting on Sheckler, Semadeni reasoned, so she should handle the complaint. "Nordia," Semadeni wrote, "Sheckler's attorney wants you to call her on Monday."

Lunsford, meanwhile, checked with Pagel, who said he knew nothing of any cocaine seizure on Sheckler's property and certainly would not have told a reporter differently. When Higgins called on Monday, Lunsford told her again that the story was wrong. Pagel, she added, denied it. Higgins was only vaguely familiar with the Sheckler case, and told Lunsford that any problem with the story should be taken up with the original reporter, Melinda Semadeni.

It was Monday morning before anyone mentioned the error to the station's news director, Dave Cupp. A gray-haired Oklahoman with a friendly smile, Cupp doubled as WVIR's regular 6 p.m. news anchor. As the Sheckler saga unfolded, Cupp was alone at the helm. The station's assistant news director had left several weeks earlier and had never been replaced. It was an uncomfortable situation, former employees say, because Cupp was used to acting mostly as an administrator, leaving journalistic decisions to his assistants. In the absence of an assistant, then, young staff people were relying mostly on their fellow reporters and photographers for guidance.

When he heard of Lunsford's complaint, days after the story aired, Cupp didn't discuss the matter with either Semadeni or Higgins. On-air corrections were rare at the station and, anyway, Lunsford had stopped calling. Cupp didn't contact her. He mentioned the complaint to the station's general manager, Harold Wright, but no one at WVIR did anything else to follow up.

Sheckler's name stayed off the airwaves for more than six months after that March weekend. When his trial began on October 29, the WVIR reporter Pedro Echevarria got the assignment. Echevarria attended the morning news meeting and took fifteen minutes to brief himself on the case before heading to the courthouse. In the months since Semadeni's story on Sheckler's arrest, no one had preserved any record of Lunsford's complaints, or indicated in any way that the original story might contain an inaccuracy. This was the story Echevarria studied before heading to the courthouse.

As the trial got under way, U.S. Attorney Jack Frels began with a summary of the government's case. Sheckler, he charged, had lent $37,000 to a man named Sam Rose, expecting Rose to buy cocaine, sell it, and repay the investment plus a profit. Serious as the charge was, that was the only charge against Sheckler, and Frels acknowledged as much in his opening statement. "He did not sell or distribute it," Frels told the jurors and spectators. "As a matter of fact, there won't be any evidence in this case that the defendant ever possessed or handled drugs."

Echevarria, though, was not there to hear this. He was back at the office, late for the trial, familiarizing himself with Semadeni's old story.

Arriving after Frels's statement, Echevarria sat through the day of testimony. He chatted briefly with some of the other reporters present, but he didn't talk to Denise Lunsford, the prosecutor, Sheckler's family, the judge, or the judge's clerk. The 6 p.m. anchor that night was Dave Cupp, who looked into the camera and read Echevarria's words: "Jesse Sheckler was one of five men arrested in March of this year," he said. "Authorities found crack cocaine and powder cocaine at his residence."

This time, there were no complaints. Sheckler was busy at his trial, testifying that he had lent Rose the money to build a house for Rose's mother. Furthermore, defense attorneys noted, Rose had named Sheckler as a coconspirator in exchange for a reduced sentence, and thus had a motive to drag him down. The jury was convinced, and found Sheckler not guilty.

Sheckler, though, soon began to learn that there was a difference between "not guilty" and "innocent." He heard the rumors floating around Greene County — that he had beaten the charges by bribing someone, by hiring a sharp lawyer, or just by getting lucky. Channel 29 reported his acquittal, but as the months went by, the uncorrected mistake was all Sheckler could think about. In March 2002, he called J. Benjamin Dick, a local lawyer he had known for years. Dick agreed to call the station on Sheckler's behalf.

Dick's five-minute conversation with Harold Wright, the station's general manager, would become a touchy subject in the months that followed. Dick has maintained that he told Wright, without naming Sheckler, that he was representing a client who had problems with a story, and that when Dick hinted at a retraction Wright told him: "We don't retract, and we support our reporters. We stick by our story." If his client wanted to sue, Dick recalls Wright saying, he was welcome to try.

Later that month, Sheckler did just that, claiming repeated libel.

The trial began in May 2003. Sheckler testified, through tears, about physical and psychological problems that had plagued him since WVIR's story ran. Matthew Murray, his new lawyer, dubbed Semadeni a "cub reporter" who had received inadequate supervision.

Murray's key witness was Bruce Pagel, the federal prosecutor who was Semadeni's sole law-enforcement source for her story. Semadeni continued to maintain that Pagel was the one who gave her the erroneous information about the drug bust, but Pagel insisted he had done no such thing. Moreover, Pagel, a longtime army reservist who Murray says "pours nails on his Cheerios in the morning," gave jurors a bizarre account of Semadeni's reporting methods.

Semadeni testified that she had spoken with Pagel only by phone, but the prosecutor recalled that after their first conversation about Sheckler, Semadeni had come to his office in person and lied to his assistant, saying Pagel had given her permission to look through a confidential case file. When Pagel and the assistant confronted the reporter, he testified, she broke down and cried.

Things didn't look good for Semadeni. This was an odd account, and reporters around Charlottesville were puzzled that she would have gone to such deceptive lengths for a simple arrest story. But then came another surprise - the testimony of Keri Schwab, a former reporter for the city's only daily paper, the Daily Progress. Schwab's time at the Progress had been short, and she had since left to become a social worker. Buried deep in the defense's witness list, she had been expected to testify, routinely, about her own experience dealing with Pagel on the Sheckler case.

Which is what she did — but with a twist. Minutes into her testimony, under sympathetic questioning from the station's lawyers, Schwab testified that it was she, not Semadeni, who had the tearful confrontation with Pagel at the federal building. She disputed the prosecutor's account in other ways, too, calling the entire episode a misunderstanding that escalated only when Pagel accused her of lying and voiced his disgust for unethical reporters.

In the aftermath of the testimony, Pagel and Murray could do little but shrug their shoulders and play down the incident as much as possible. Pagel later explained that he had spent seven months of army service away from Charlottesville immediately after the confrontation, and his memory of Schwab and Semadeni, the two twenty-something reporters who look nothing alike, was hazy. Schwab, he says now, was probably telling the truth.

Schwab's testimony contradicted the account of one of Sheckler's most important witnesses, and suddenly Semadeni's account was easier to believe. But it wasn't enough. That same afternoon, the jurors retired for deliberations, their ears ringing with Murray's closing exhortation to return an "enormous verdict" that "will travel just as far and just as wide and just as deep as the lies, the poisonous lies spread by 29."

Three hours later, they filed back into the courtroom. Their judgment was for Jesse Sheckler, in the amount of $10 million.

Visiting Charlottesville a little more than a month after the trial, I found that most people had moved on from the strange tale of Jesse Sheckler and Channel 29. But the chattering class, in a town that loves to chatter, was still simmering with gossip about the award, a record for a Virginia libel suit by a factor of five.

The lingering question was how Semadeni and the station could have gotten such a straightforward story so wrong. Both Semadeni and Pagel knew the truth would come out eventually, so why would either of them fabricate a cocaine raid?

With the reporter and the prosecutor both sticking to their stories, a third explanation began to emerge. Maybe Pagel had given Semadeni the bare details of Sheckler's indictment and she had misunderstood. She was new to courthouse reporting, and the indictment was complex. The first count — the only one that named Sheckler — charged him and four others with conspiracy to possess and distribute drugs, a charge that does not require any proof of actual possession. Further, the charge referred to legal "threshold weights" of fifty grams of crack and 500 grams of powder cocaine — the very numbers that had turned up in Semadeni's story.

Could the judgment against the station have sprung from such a colossal misunderstanding?

Thomas Albro, the quietly intense former city council member who represented WVIR in the lawsuit, told me the case boils down to a question of whom you believe: Semadeni or Pagel. Either Pagel gave the reporter the bad information she broadcast, or she somehow came up with it on her own. Albro insists it was the former. (No one at Channel 29 would talk about the case — including Semadeni, who has since moved out of town.)

Most of Albro's scorn, though, was reserved for the jury, which he believes was inflamed by the rhetoric from Sheckler's side. "It's not that they found us liable that is so troublesome to me," he said. "It's that they came back with an award that was preposterous, that bears no relation to damages that he actually suffered."

Sheckler, he said, citing medical records, had a long history of depression, dating back years before WVIR's broadcast. He had been arrested on the drug charge in public, then charged with being part of a high-profile conspiracy in a conservative, law-abiding county where he was well known. Given all this, Albro argued, how could Sheckler claim that the one mistake in Channel 29's story had damaged him more than a wholly accurate story would have? Could all the damage to his reputation and psyche be pinned to one simple error, rather than to the arrest or all the other turmoil in his life?

The jurors, Albro believes, overlooked all that and sought to punish the station, even after the judge ruled that they could award only compensatory — not punitive — damages. "Selective perception is a very powerful force in jury trials," he said. "Once you've made up your mind about who should win and who should lose, you tend to filter information."

In the Sheckler case, he added, "I think it was essentially, 'We want to make him happy, and we'll give him ten million dollars if that's what it takes.'"

But Jesse Sheckler is not happy, as I found out minutes into my first telephone conversation with him. "You've got to understand," he sighed, "I'm real cautious now what I say or don't say. I don't trust nobody. What they did hurt me so much, I'll never get over it."

When I met him in person, after a long drive into the hills of Greene County, he was in front of his garage with a customer. He looked relaxed, with grease around his fingernails and his thick shoulders hunched under the hood of a Ford Ranger pickup. When he finished what he was doing and sat down in his office to talk about the lawsuit, though, Sheckler changed. His voice got quieter, and his blue eyes took on a dull, distant look.

In a near-monologue that lasted for the next three hours, he told me of his childhood spent in foster homes, sometimes eating toothpaste to stay alive, and of his adoption by a loving but impoverished family with no indoor plumbing. He spoke of learning to work as a mechanic, of finally opening his own shop in 1979, and of building his own house on the same property over the next decade with the help of a few friends. He talked about his loans to Sam Rose, who was later convicted of dealing drugs — though Sheckler still isn't convinced that that's how his former friend spent the money.

Most of all, Sheckler spoke about the lawsuit, in obsessive detail. He was alternately tearful and matter-of-fact - as he was when he told me of the times he sat behind the garage with a handgun and thought about suicide. "The only thing they understand is money," he said, referring to Channel 29. "We've got to get them in the pocketbook. This thing is so important, that they don't do this to any other people. Because it's wrong. They showed no sorrow, nothing."

He thinks about the case constantly, especially when he watches the evening news. "Every time you see something on TV you just wonder," he said, fidgeting with a bottle cap on his desk as his wife, Becky, looked on from across the room. "I wonder if that's another story where they screwed somebody's life up."

On July 21, Judge Edward Hogshire heard WVIR's motion to overturn the libel verdict. At press time, he had not announced his decision, but it may not matter. Both sides say they will appeal as far as the Virginia Supreme Court. The process, they say, could take years." (Jake Mooney, Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 5, September/October 2003)

Jake Mooney lives in New York. He worked at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville for two and a half years.