California Sup. Ct. says media can publicize facts from old court cases

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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http://www.calaware.org/news/weekly_detail.jsp?article_id=380

Issue Date: 2004-12-06
Volume: 1
Number: 34

SAN FRANCISCO, December 6 (CalAware) – Overruling its own 33-year-old 
privacy law decision, the California Supreme Court today held that the 
media are free to publicize facts from forgotten court cases.

In Gates v. Discovery Communications, case no. S115008, the court 
unanimously ruled that there can be no invasion of privacy liability for 
publishing or otherwise disseminating facts from the record of a prior 
judicial proceeding, no matter how old the case, no matter how arbitrary 
the disclosure, and no matter how much anguish the resurrection of the 
information causes to those freshly exposed.

The plaintiff, Steve Gates, served 17 months in prison, reduced for good 
behavior from a three year sentence, ending in 1995. His offense was as 
an accessory after the fact in a hitman-for-hire slaying of a car 
salesman in 1988.

Gates, with no prior criminal record, was assistant manager of the 
Pomona auto dealership whose owner was convicted of ordering the killing 
to prevent the victim from proceeding with a class action lawsuit 
against the owner’s father, who owned another dealership.

It took police years to convict the dealer, in part because Gates 
initially refused to testify about him. He eventually did, but then said 
he had kept silent in fear for the lives of his wife and parents.

The defendant media company produced a documentary aired on the 
Discovery Channel in 2001 that retold the story, using Gates’s name and 
photograph from the case records. The episode, titled “Deadly 
Commission,” was part of a series, “The Prosecutors,” that reconstructed 
past criminal investigations using interviews with principals and court 
documents.

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