Ohio judge settles out of court over Web comments
An Ohio judge taken off a high-profile murder trial has dropped her $50 million lawsuit against a Cleveland newspaper and reached an undisclosed financial settlement with an affiliated company that runs the publication’s website.
Cuyahoga County Judge Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and her adult daughter filed their lawsuit against The Plain Dealer, its parent company and the website operator in April over anonymous comments on the site that the newspaper said were traced to Saffold’s personal e-mail.
The inflammatory comments concerned the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who has pleaded not guilty to killing 11 women whose remains were found around his Cleveland home.
After the newspaper reported that the comments, including one critical of a Sowell attorney, had been connected to the judge, the defense team sought to have her removed from Sowell’s case. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed to do so, saying her removal was needed to avoid the appearance of bias.
The judge denied posting the comments and said they came from her daughter, Sydney Saffold, using a joint family account.
The Saffolds sued, claiming that the defendants released confidential information in violation of the website privacy policy. The suit was dismissed Thursday, said Brian Spitz, an attorney for the judge and her daughter. “We filed a suit that was for a very important cause and that my clients believed in very deeply and felt like fighting through until they got the resolution that they wanted,” Spitz told The Associated Press on Friday. “At the end of the day, my clients were very happy…”
An online editor decided to track down the e-mail address associated with the comments without consulting anyone, The Plain Dealer had said. Advance Internet later blocked editors’ access to the personal information of people who posted comments and said it never intended to make that information available to its affiliated newspapers.
Anyone here who comments regularly on the Web probably has a strong opinion about privacy rights – whether you avail yourself of them or not.
Site after site identifies email information as private. Violating that confidence is reasonably sleazy. An act for which the Plain Dealer has had to pony up an unpublished amount of money.
