Wednesday, November 28, 2007 Malilong: Gov. Garcia vs. Saavedra: a draw By Frank malilong The Other Side
MANY years ago when I was still with The Freeman, we had a reporter who wrote a story on a robbery. His report was accurate except for one very bad mistake: he interchanged the characters so that the victim became the robber. As a result, we were sued for libel. Fortunately, the case was settled out of court.
Our reporter’s gaffe was, of course, not the first of its kind in an industry that operates on a deadline. Even the prestigious pre-martial law Manila Times was guilty of that clumsy mistake when it put the wrong captions of two pictures that appeared on the same issue of the newspaper.
One group picture of six well-dressed gentlemen was described in the caption as six persons who were arrested by customs authorities for illegal salvaging of sunken bombs while the picture of the six who were arrested carried the caption intended for the photo of the six gentlemen.
The Manila Times was sued by one of the six (gentlemen, not the illegal salvors) for libel. The court however dismissed the case, ruling that the interchange of captions was an honest mistake and there was no malice on the part of the defendants.
The absence of the essential element of malice is the same ground invoked by the city prosecutor’s office in dismissing the libel case filed by businessman Crisologo Saavedra against Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia.
I have not read the complete text of the prosecutor’s resolution. But from what the newspapers have reported, it seems that while the prosecutors agree that calling someone a self-righteous, sanctimonious bald-headed creature may be defamatory and false, it cannot give rise to a criminal prosecution for libel because malice cannot be inferred.
This is so, said the prosecutors, because Saavedra is a public figure by his own making when he blew the whistle on anomalies allegedly perpetrated by government officials.
(I do not know Saavedra and have seen his picture only in the papers so I can only assume that what the prosecutors described as false was the statement that he is self-righteous and sanctimonious and not that part about the absence of a canopy to cover his head.) But what is malice? How can you prove it?
Even American criminal law experts admit the difficulty in defining malice and, much more, in proving it. In a paper published in the Yale Law Journal, they conceded that the element of malice “is not so easily understood or proved.”
In ordinary conversation, the paper said, the term is “pretty nearly equivalent to hatred, ill-will or spite, and when it is said that a man acts maliciously, the meaning is that he acts with deliberate intention of injuring some one.”
“Where it is possible to prove the existence of this state of mind, it is sufficient to support an action for libel. It is, of course, difficult to arrive at this result directly, because the matter lies entirely in the mind of the person charted, and therefore his own admission is the only direct evidence attainable.”
Simply stated and quoting lawyer Eddie Baritta, dili nato masimba kon unsay naa sa sulod sa hunahuna sa tawo.
But Saavedra should not despair or go ballistic as my friend and Capitol consultant Rory Sepulveda did when he learned of the dismissal of his client’s complaint against the whistleblower.
The city prosecutor did not deal either one of them a bad hand. He simply called it a draw.
