Eideard

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 An act for which the Plain Dealer has had to pony up an unpublished amount of money.

Not living in Cleveland, I usually wouldn’t feel called upon to note a “local” issue. I think this is a sign of the times – and worth covering for that reason.

Parish priests throughout the eight-county diocese read “special delivery” letters from Bishop Richard Lennon during Saturday evening Masses, announcing whether their churches would close or remain open.

The diocese declined to publicly release the entire list until today, when parishes without Saturday Masses will learn their fates.

The entire list…outlines a plan for 52 fewer parishes by next year. Twenty-nine of the diocese’s 224 parishes will close, while 41 will merge, creating 18 new parishes. Affected churches must close by July 1, 2010…

The downsizing, said to be the first in the history of the 162-year-old diocese, is due to a shortage of priests, changing demographics and wanting collection baskets, the bishop has said.

“We’re just too big for the number of people that we have,” Lennon said in a recent interview, noting that the number of practicing Catholics in the diocese dwindled from 1 million 50 years ago to less than 800,000 today…

The diocese has said it hopes to sell the closed churches, though some, it noted, will be torn down. Sacred artifacts such as chalices, tabernacles, statues and stained-glass windows will be removed from the closed churches and offered to other churches in the diocese, the diocese has said. Artifacts that can’t be reused will be stored until sold.

No gloating. Even though I consider organized religion – and philosophical idealism for the erudite – to be a social form serving only a leftover gene or two about as useful as the appendix, each step in the inevitable diminishing superstructure will be difficult for those folks unaccustomed to change, unwilling to learn and grow into a changing society.