Justices Overturn Privacy Decision

The entertainment industry and the news media may disclose information from public records -- even if it is decades old -- without violating a person’s right to privacy, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday.

The decision overturned a 33-year-old state high court precedent that the media complained had inhibited them from disclosing dated but truthful information in movies, television and journalism.

“If you were making a movie ... and wanted to talk about someone who had been convicted of a serious crime years ago, you had to worry if you were going to catch a lawsuit that would be expensive to fight,” said Louis P. Petrich, a lawyer in the case whose firm reviews programs for the entertainment industry.

Monday’s decision came in a case brought by Steven Gates, a San Bernardino man who accused the Discovery Channel of invading his privacy after it repeatedly aired an hourlong show about a San Diego murder in which Gates had been convicted of being an accessory after the fact. The murder had been committed more than 12 years earlier.

“Now they are saying that the media can just walk all over anyone any time they want,” Gates said when told of the decision.

When Discovery aired the episode on a series called “The Prosecutors” in 2001, Gates was a successful salesman, owned a business with his wife and a home in an upscale neighborhood. His clients, neighbors and more distant relatives had been unaware of his felony conviction.

In ruling against Gates, the high court did not dispute that he had “lived an obscure, lawful life” after his brief prison term and become a “respected member of the community.” A court awarded him a certificate of rehabilitation last year, restoring his legal rights.

Nevertheless, “courts are not freed, by the mere passage of time, to impose sanctions on the publication of truthful information that is obtained from public official court records,” Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for the court.

“Neither that defendants’ documentary was of a historical nature nor that it involved ‘reenactments,’ rather than firsthand coverage, of the events reported diminishes any constitutional protection it enjoys,” she wrote.

Werdegar said the court was obligated to follow decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court that came after the state high court’s ruling giving rehabilitated felons the right to sue the media for identifying them in stories about old crimes.

In the 1971 case, a man had sued Reader’s Digest for including him in a 1966 article about truck hijackings. The article did not mention that the man’s crime had occurred 11 years earlier.

The state high court held that a jury could reasonably determine that the use of the man’s name was not newsworthy and not protected free speech under the 1st Amendment.

Since that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected invasion-of-privacy lawsuits against media defendants who reported information gleaned from public records.

“Any state interest in protecting, for rehabilitative purposes, the long-term anonymity of former convicts” is not compelling enough justification to violate 1st Amendment rights, Werdegar wrote.

The show that sparked the case dealt with the murder for hire of a car salesman who was shot in the head at his San Diego County home on Sept. 17, 1988. A prominent auto dealer, whom Gates had worked for, was eventually convicted of masterminding the murder to deter a class-action lawsuit the victim had brought against the dealer’s parents.

Gates later learned that his boss had ordered the murder and said he was warned that his parents and his wife would be killed if he told authorities what he knew. He said he “hedged” about what he knew before a grand jury and pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. He originally had been charged as a co-conspirator.

“My father wanted me to go to trial,” Gates said Monday, “but I was too scared.”

The lawsuit was partly successful despite Monday’s ruling, Gates said, because Discovery Channel stopped airing the episode after the lawsuit was filed. “I didn’t want my name or face on television again. I won that.”

Niles R. Sharif, Gates’ lawyer, said he would appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Unless the ruling is overturned, “guys like Gates can never live down what they have done as long as someone -- anyone -- wants to keep bringing it up to the public,” Sharif said.

Petrich, who represented the media in the case, said the decision was a crucial victory for the 1st Amendment.

“People in the entertainment business, historians and journalists should all be happy,” said Petrich, who represented Discovery Communications Inc., which owns the Discovery Channel. “This gives us a categorical rule that, as long as we are citing something from public records, we are safe from a claim of privacy.”