A little-known state judge in Mississippi has made a national name for herself by issuing one of the most stupefying, anti-First Amendment rulings in the annals of American jurisprudence.
When Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin ordered this week that the Clarksdale Press Register remove an editorial from its website, one has to wonder whether the judge has spent much time studying the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press and the multitude of higher court opinions that have reaffirmed that this freedom can only be abridged in the most extreme cases, such as when public safety is put at an immediate and substantial risk by the publication of the information.
The case at hand comes nowhere close to that standard.
The Clarksdale newspaper, a sister publication to the Commonwealth, published an editorial a couple of weeks ago that criticized officials in that city for not notifying in advance the newspaper or other media of a special called meeting — an apparent violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act. The meeting was held to finalize details of Clarksdale’s plan to lobby the state Legislature for a local and private bill that would allow that city to collect a 2% tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco sales, with the proceeds ostensibly going toward beefing up the city’s police force.
The editorial actually supported the idea in general, saying that having more and better-paid police officers is a good idea. It just raised suspicions about why the final step was taken without proper notice, and it questioned the loose language of the proposed law, saying that it appeared to open the way for the “sin tax” proceeds to be used for other purposes than how it was being sold to the public.
The city’s mayor, Chuck Espy, and the commissioners, who have butted heads with the newspaper’s editor, Floyd Ingram, over his aggressive coverage, claimed that the editorial libeled them, and the commissioners voted for the city to sue him and the newspaper. They said the failure to notify the paper about the special called meeting was a clerical oversight and that the editorial threatened to derail their pursuit of the sin tax legislation. Curiously, they filed in Hinds County, rather than their home Coahoma County, seeking the court order to get the editorial removed from the paper’s website.
Martin concurred without giving the newspaper an opportunity to argue its side. The result has been a storm of national news coverage, donations to the paper and widespread outrage by numerous media organizations, which see this as just one more attempt by those in government at all levels to curb the watchdog role of the press.
The judge’s order has also backfired. If the intent was to reduce how many people read the editorial, it has probably achieved just the opposite. It has made those in the Legislature and elsewhere all the more curious as to what it said. Have Clarksdale city officials and the judge never thought about the 2,000 or so print copies of that issue that were distributed, and that anyone with a cellphone can take a picture of the printed version and distribute it widely on the internet?
The lawsuit and the judge’s ruling are a nuisance that the Clarksdale paper and its owner will have to spend some money fighting. Unless the judicial system has gone completely crazy, the lawsuit will be thrown out, since government bodies cannot be defamed, and the judge’s order will be overturned, since it attempts to negate not just the ability but the obligation of the press to hold government accountable.
That accountability also applies to the courts. Martin has brought a huge dose onto herself by making such a blatantly unconstitutional decision.
The original version of this editorial incorrectly suggested that Chuck Espy voted to file the lawsuit against the Clarksdale newspaper. Espy supported the city board's decision but did not vote on it.
