PAPER LIBELED SHOCKLEY, JURY SAYS
PHYSICIST AWARDED $1 IN DAMAGES FOR ARTICLE ON RACE
AND GENETICS
Author: Associated Press
Date: Saturday, September 15, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
A federal jury decided yesterday that physicist William Shockley was libeled
by a newspaper article comparing his genetics proposals to those of the Nazis,
but awarded him only $1 in actual damages and no money in punitive damages.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist had been seeking $1.25 million in
damages for the article, published in 1980 in the Atlanta Constitution, which
he said libeled him.
Shockley, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for his role in
the invention of the transistor, was seeking damages against Cox Enterprises
Inc., owner of the Atlanta Constitution, and former newspaper writer Roger
Witherspoon for the article, which he said libeled him by comparing his
controversial proposal for voluntary sterilization of the "genetically
disadvantaged" with Nazi genetic experiments in World War II.
"The verdict is inadequate," Shockley said after the decision was
announced. "The Constitution has not in any way been punished for libel and
this will encourage the press to take equal freedom in libeling others."
Shockley said he would talk to his lawyers about whether to appeal the
decision.
Al Norman, an attorney for the newspaper and for Witherspoon, said: "To
the extent of (paying* 50 cents apiece, we came out close to winning. Total
victory would have been zero."
Witherspoon said he did not "view it as a loss. . . . If they had thought
I was reckless or was out to get the guy - anything other than give him a fair
shake - he would have gotten a heck of a lot more than a buck and there would
have been punitive damages as well."
The six-member jury deliberated for a total of about 3 1/2 hours, after
hearing the judge tell them that only the alleged libel - not Shockley's
controversial genetic theory - was on trial.
"You are here to try a case of libel. You are not here to determine the
validity of anybody's plans or programs . . . to agree or disagree with what
people propose," said US District Judge Robert Vining.
Witherspoon no longer works for the Constitution.
Shockley contends that blacks as a group are intellectually inferior to
whites for genetic reasons. He has proposed a bonus program of financial
rewards for the "disadvantaged" who voluntarily undergo sterilization.
Witherspoon said in the article that "the Shockley program was tried out
in Germany during World War II" and that Shockley's proposals were "reworked
Hitlerian experiments." Shockley said those statements were libelous.
The jury of three men and three women, five of them white and one black,
received the case just after noon yesterday on the eighth day of the trial.
Witherspoon testified earlier that he factually described Shockley's
sterilization program in the article and then used a "rhetorical device" in
comparing Shockley's plan with Nazi experiments.
Defense witnesses have contended that the article was a column, in which
Witherspoon, now a free-lance writer, was authorized to draw opinions. They
argued that no reader would have taken the comparison between the programs as
a literal one.
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