The Supreme Court has upheld a £60,000 damages award to Finbarr Hill over a Cork Examiner article which a jury found falsely suggested he was a sex offender or child molester.
Mr Hill was serving a three-year prison sentence in Cork Prison for occasioning actual bodily harm when the newspaper published an article on October 25th, 1995, under the headline “Isolation of Cork Jail’s C Wing”. A photograph of Mr Hill in his cell accompanied the article, which stated that prisoners in C Wing included child molesters, sexual offenders and prisoners segregated for their own protection.
A High Court jury concluded in November 2000 that a reasonable reader would have understood the article as placing Mr Hill among those categories and that he had therefore been libelled. It awarded him £60,000.
Cork Examiner Publications appealed, arguing among other things that the jury’s interpretation was wrong, that the trial judge had excessively restricted evidence about Mr Hill’s criminal history, that the jury had been misdirected and that the award was excessive.
Mr Justice Francis D Murphy rejected those arguments. He found that the jury was entitled to interpret the article and photographs as it did. He also held that the trial judge had correctly distinguished between admissible evidence of Mr Hill’s general reputation and impermissible exploration of the detailed circumstances of particular misconduct.
The Supreme Court also rejected complaints about the judge’s directions concerning the photograph and the defamatory meaning of the article.
On damages, the court acknowledged that £60,000 was substantial and may have been at the upper end of the appropriate range. However, it stressed the special deference traditionally given to jury awards in defamation cases and found that the sum was not so disproportionate to the injury as to justify appellate intervention.
The appeal was dismissed and the High Court judgment and award were affirmed.