People v. Croswell

In 1801, the 22-year-old Harry Croswell, originally from West Hartford, Connecticut, moved across the Hudson River from Catskill, New York, where he had been apprenticed as a printer and learned the trade of journalism from his brother Mackay Croswell, moving to the growing port city of Hudson. A strong sympathizer with the Federalist Party of President John Adams, he took a job writing for the Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper with similar political leanings. Around the same time, another journalist, Charles Holt, had come to Hudson. From Connecticut, he had sympathies that were strongly with the opposing Democratic-Republican Party, usually known as Republicans, of Thomas Jefferson. The two parties were often at odds, attempting to convince the public that their respective visions of the new nation and policies were the best and that those of the other party were flawed and would lead to disaster and tyranny. Holt came to Hudson to start The Bee so that he could counteract the influence of the Balance. Croswell then convinced his own editor at the Balance to let him start The Wasp, a small sheet, dedicated to attacking and antagonizing Holt and disparaging Republican politicians and Jefferson. Croswell wrote under the pseudonym of "Robert Rusticoat". The two newspapers engaged in vicious and often witty exchanges over several months. ==Trial==

In the September 9, 1802 issue of The Wasp, Croswell repeated a charge against Jefferson that had first appeared in the Evening Post, a New York City newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton. Holt had mocked the Federalists' claims against Jefferson's character and said the worst they could say about him was that he had paid a fellow Virginian, James Thompson Callender, to attack the Adams administration in print. "This is wholly false," Croswell responded. Federalists had been charging that Jefferson had paid Callender not only to attack Adams but also to call the late George Washington "a traitor, robber and perjurer ... and for most grossly slandering the private characters of men who, he well knew, were virtuous." No supporter of Jefferson, he claimed, had ever responded, or would respond, to that charge "in an open manly discussion." Lewis instructed the jury to consider only the question of whether or not Croswell had beyond reasonable doubt indeed published the statements. He was convicted on both counts. ==Appeal==

The Supreme Court heard the appeal on February 13, 1804. Alexander Hamilton, who had been unavailable to argue for Croswell at the trial, made a six-hour statement on his behalf. He built his appeal on three points: • That the trial judge had erred in disallowing the continuance requested to allow Callender to testify; • that the allegedly libelous statements were so substantially and materially different from what had previously been published in the Post as to not constitute libel, and • that the judge erred in instructing the jury to consider only the facts of the case. On the second point, Hamilton discoursed at great length, summarized in the opinion. Roman law had recognized truth as a defense to charges of libel; why had the English common law, from which the laws of New York derived, abandoned that, he asked. He found his answer in the Star Chamber, the secret medieval court that existed to try to punish those too powerful to submit to ordinary justice. "That is not the court from which we are to expect principles and precedents friendly to freedom," he observed. Hamilton concluded: James Kent agreed with Hamilton in a lengthy review of English law. The jury should have been allowed to consider the law of the case despite recent uncertainty in England as to whether that was sound in libel prosecutions. English law in the time of the Star Chamber had disallowed truth as a defense, saying "The reason assigned for the punishment of libels, whether true or false, is because they tend to a breach of the peace, by inciting the libelled party to revenge, or the people to sedition." But that, Kent held, had led to an overly tame English press, and laws in the new nation had already been tending toward allowing the truth, if justified, as a defense to a libel charge. Justice Thompson concurred, but Lewis and the other justice concluded that the same English authorities required they affirm the conviction. The tie vote meant the conviction stood. But Croswell was never sentenced, and though he was eventually granted a new trial it never occurred. Thus the case was never disposed. ==Aftermath==

In 1805 the New York Legislature wrote Hamilton's position into law: it was always lawful for a libel defendant to introduce in his defense that the statements at issue were true. That was written into the state constitution in 1821. In the meantime, similar provisions had also been added to the laws and constitutions of other states, some allowing even greater latitude. In 1809, the Pennsylvania General Assembly went the furthest by enacting into statute the provision that the truth of the charge alone was a sufficient defense in any criminal libel trial if the target of the alleged libel was an officeholder. During the appeal, Hamilton had stayed with a friend in Albany, John Taylor. Over dinner one night with the Taylor family, he made some cutting remarks about Aaron Burr, his political rival. Charles D. Cooper, also in attendance, reported them later in the year, just days before the state's gubernatorial election. Burr lost and, blaming his defeat on Hamilton, challenged him to the duel that cost Hamilton his life. ==Legacy==

Twenty years later, James Kent observed that courts had begun applying that standard to all civil defamation actions, regardless of who the plaintiff was. "If the charge, in its substance and measure, be true in point of fact, the law considers the plaintiff as coming into court without any equitable title to relief." He felt that a distinction still needed to be drawn between those in the public trust and others, with those accused of libel in the latter instance still required to justify their publication of defamatory, yet true, facts about those individuals. Since many states later repealed their criminal libel statutes, the standard adopted for civil cases, where truth alone was a defense, became the standard for libel in the United States. A century and a half after Kent's commentary, the U.S. Supreme Court began distinguishing between public and private figures in defamation actions. In cases such as New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, Associated Press v. Walker and Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., it afforded the media greater latitude, through the actual malice test, when challenged over allegedly false and defamatory statements by public figures than private ones. Britain, as well as many of its former colonies, retains a libel standard where truthful statements with negative import must still be justified by some higher purpose to overcome a libel claim. In the 21st century, the Internet lessened the effect of international borders on the flow of information. This created some international issues when wealthy individuals filed suit against American authors in British courts alleging defamation. Some American states, including New York, have passed laws insulating their residents against what has been called libel tourism. ==References==