Louisiana supreme court justice wins rare $300,000 defamation trial against newspaper

Then Advocate editor-in-chief and writer testified editorial was not part of agenda against Jefferson Davis Hughes III A jury on Monday awarded $300,000 to a Louisiana supreme court justice over a 2019 editorial by the state’s largest newspaper in a rare defamation trial involving an elected public official. Jurors in Iberville parish, Louisiana, found that the editorial whose headline included “Jeff Hughes … made a mockery of justice” and was published by the Advocate had defamed state supreme court justice Jefferson Davis Hughes III. The $300,000 in damages that the jury awarded Hughes were nonetheless significantly less than the $10m he sought for what he described as injury to his reputation and emotional distress. In a complex case that involved days of testimony and arguments in its trial phase, Hughes as a public figure had to prove “actual malice” in connection with the editorial, which centered on how he handled a child custody case earlier in his career as a district court judge in 1998 and 1999.

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