Herald fights $2m libel verdict
Says judge wrote 'bullying' letters
The Boston Herald yesterday attacked a $2 million libel verdict awarded to state Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy in February, alleging that Murphy's recent attempts to freeze the newspaper's assets would ''cripple" its business.
The newspaper also said that the judge wrote ''bullying" letters to publisher Patrick J. Purcell demanding more than $3.2 million to end the case.
In the handwritten letters that the Herald said Purcell received, copies of which were filed with a court brief, Murphy proposed a face-to-face meeting with Purcell and a representative of the newspaper's insurance company and urged Purcell not to inform the lawyers at the Herald's principal law firm, Brown Rudnick, that the meeting was taking place.
Murphy proposed that it would be in Purcell's business interest to bring a check to that meeting for $3.2 million, ''shake my hand, and let me walk away with that check."
Using his Superior Court stationery, Murphy also wrote the Herald stood ''ZERO chance" of success on appeal and warned that Purcell would be making a ''BIG mistake" to show one of the letters to anyone except the insurance company lawyers.
The letters were filed with a motion to Superior Court Judge Charles R. Johnson, who presided at the trial, asking him to throw out the jury award.
In the letters, Murphy warned that an appeal of the case would be costly and pointless. ''[If] You and/or your insurer want to pay me $331,056 per year [in interest] for the next two or three years while you spend another 500 large tilting at windmills in the appellate courts . . . be my guest," he wrote. ''You are lucky, Mr. Purcell, that the jury came back at 2 million. I was betting on 5. Ernie."
Bruce W. Sanford, the Herald's Washington, D.C.-based appellate attorney, said yesterday that Murphy's attempts to attach the Herald's assets and his letters demonstrate ''a clear pattern of outrageous conduct."
''The judge's letters are a stark and sad attempt to bully the Herald into abandoning its constitutional rights [to an appeal] and give him more money than he was awarded at trial," Sanford said.
Contrary to Murphy's assertion, Sanford said, about 70 percent of libel awards in favor of public figures are overturned by higher courts nationally.
Murphy's lawyers dismissed the newspaper's statements yesterday, saying the letters were a continuation of off-the-record settlement discussions that Murphy and Purcell had opened prior to the jury verdict.
Howard Cooper, a lawyer for Murphy, said Purcell and Murphy met twice without lawyers before the verdict. ''At the conclusion of those meetings, it was agreed that they would always hold the lines of communication open," Cooper said.
Murphy also was well within the bounds of legal propriety to ask that the Brown Rudnick lawyers be excluded from the meeting, Cooper said, since he believed they ''had been an impediment to settling the case" before trial.
Cooper also disputed Sanford's assertion that Murphy's use of his court stationery was improper, because the case was about Murphy's conduct as a judge.
In legal papers filed yesterday, the Herald also asserted that it has more than enough insurance coverage to satisfy the verdict. Last month, Murphy asked the judge in the case to bar the Herald from selling its assets, saying that he feared that recent economic troubles in the newspaper industry would make it impossible for him to collect.
On Feb. 18, a Suffolk jury ordered the Herald to pay Murphy $2.09 million after finding that the paper and its reporter David Wedge had libeled him in a series of stories that ran in 2002.
The stories, which began with the front-page headline ''Murphy's Law," portrayed him as a lenient judge who had made inflammatory and insensitive remarks about two crime victims. The judge later trimmed the judgment by $85,000. 