Objections Prompt Recess During Hoiles’ Testimony

After listening to a host of hostile witnesses testify for the last six weeks, Harry H. Hoiles finally took the stand Monday to tell his side of the story in the long-running family dispute over control of Freedom Newspapers Inc.

But Hoiles, who is trying to dissolve the company, barely got through a brief corporate history, including an outline of Freedom’s libertarian goals, when a growing number of objections led both sets of lawyers and Orange County Superior Court Judge Leonard Goldstein to call an early recess so they could research an area of the law regarding hearsay testimony.

Hoiles did manage to enumerate what he believed to be some of the libertarian principles by which the Irvine-based media chain operates.

Those principles provide some of the backbone for his claims that the families of his sister, Mary Jane Hoiles Hardie, and his late brother, Clarence H. Hoiles, unfairly froze him out of management and greatly reduced the value of his family’s stock.

The three branches of founder R.C. Hoiles’ family each own about a third of the company, which operates the Orange County Register, 28 other dailies and five television stations.

Hoiles wants to withdraw from the company with a third of its assets, but the majority wants to keep the firm together and has offered Hoiles a steeply discounted price for his stock, claiming that it represents a minority interest and is not marketable.

Questioning of Hoiles by his trial lawyer, Vernon W. Hunt Jr., was repeatedly interrupted Monday by objections from Leonard A. Hampel, one of the defense lawyers.

Hampel objected to Hunt’s questioning techniques and to his efforts to obtain hearsay testimony--what some of the defendants told Hoiles at different times from late 1980 to April, 1982, when Hoiles filed the lawsuit.

Hunt is trying to show that the defendants failed to object for nearly a year to Hoiles’ claim that he had the right, under the family-run company’s libertarian principles, to withdraw from Freedom Newspapers with a full third of its assets.

The questioning Monday was designed to produce Hoiles’ recollections of what his relatives said, or failed to say, at meetings and in conversations with him for nearly a year after he first announced his desire to leave the company.

Such hearsay testimony is usually excluded from a trial but can be allowed under specific exceptions or with certain limitations.

Goldstein is expected to rule on the admissibility of such evidence this morning.