A Right & a Duty

For two months, in Louisiana's booming oil and chemical town of Lake Charles (pop. 41,202), a court has been pondering a question vital to the U.S. press: Is there a sharp limit to a newspaper's freedom to criticize public officials? Last week District Judge J. Bernard Cocke handed down a ruling that was a flat no. Criticism of public officials, he held, is not only a newspaper's right but its duty. He acquitted Managing Editor Kenneth Dixon and four other members of the Lake Charles American Press of criminal charges that their crusade last spring against wide open gambling had defamed the local sheriff, district attorney and three gamblers (TIME, Sept. 10).

Said Judge Cocke: "Any citizen or newspaper has the right to criticize the public acts of public officials. Without that right, we would have a dictatorial form of government, and the discussion of important public issues would be only such as might be permitted by those holding positions of authority."

Defamed. All U.S. newsmen had taken such rights for granted. Dixon and his men learned otherwise when they began printing the facts about corruption in Calcasieu Parish. They stirred a citizens' committee into gathering evidence against 33 gambling house proprietors. But in court the gamblers got off with light fines and suspended jail sentences, although usually such treatment is given only to first offenders.

Dixon, printing past police records of 15 men who had names identical to some of the men on trial, questioned their right to probation. When it turned out that three of the gamblers merely had the same names as actual men whose records were printed, the grand jury indicted the American Press for defaming the gamblers and for criticizing Sheriff Henry ("Ham") Reid and District Attorney Griffin Hawkins for not prosecuting them further.

Tongue-Lashing. During the trial, Judge Cocke had been so critical of Dixon's failure to check more carefully the police records he printed that both sheriff and district attorney confidently expected a conviction. What they heard instead was a scathing tongue-lashing for their own failure to enforce the law. After ruling that the gamblers had not been defamed because the errors had been printed without malice, Judge Cocke added: "The evidence . . . disclosed that commercial gambling had been conducted on a wide-open basis ... in violation of the laws of the state for . . . many months ... A public official ... is required to take an oath of office ... to support . . . the laws . . . The purpose of the oath is to hold him accountable to the people . . ."

Sheriff Reid, the judge added, had "naught to blame but himself" for printed charges that he had concealed official records from newsmen to keep them from checking gamblers' records; the evidence indicated that he had done just that. As the judge read on, the startled sheriff and district attorney stalked angrily out of court. Editor Ken Dixon had not only won his battle in court. Since the case started, gambling has been closed tight in Calcasieu Parish.

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