Soldier of Misfortune

Sometimes the American propensity to cast about for someone to blame--preferably someone with deep, money-lined pockets--leads to strange results. We think that’s what happened last week, when a Texas jury ordered Soldier of Fortune magazine to pay $9.4 million in damages to the survivors of a woman whose husband hired her killer through a classified advertisement in the magazine.

The jury decided that the magazine was negligent and contributed to the woman’s death because it should have known that the ad had been placed by a contract killer. It’s not clear to us how the publisher and business manager of Soldier of Fortune would have known from the ad’s innocuous text that a criminal act was contemplated. The ad, tamer than most that the magazine ran until it dropped such advertising in 1986, offered the services of ex-Marines and Vietnam veterans trained as weapons specialists, pilots and jungle-warfare experts to undertake “high-risk assignments.” It’s not clear to us how thoroughly a publication is supposed to investigate its advertisers--though you can bet that legions of media lawyers are pondering that issue in light of the Soldier of Fortune verdict.

We believe that anyone who directly incites a crime through speech or advertising ought to be held responsible; while the courts have ruled that advertising has some constitutional protection, the First Amendment should not shield criminal activity. But the connection between the Soldier of Fortune ad and the 1985 murder of Sandra Black--who was shot to death in the kitchen of her Bryan, Tex., home--seems awfully attenuated. If Soldier of Fortune was partly responsible, how about the airline that flew Mrs. Black’s assassin, John Wayne Hearn, to Texas? Or the car-rental agency that leased Hearn his car? Or the gun shop that sold him the murder weapon? Or the phone company that Mrs. Black’s husband, Robert, used to contact Hearn? They all played parts, too.

Soldier of Fortune, which styles itself “the journal for professional adventurers,” is not usually part of our reading. Its articles, like the ads that it once ran, seem aimed at would-be mercenaries and Walter Mitty types eager to hire themselves out to fight someone else’s war--though its publisher says that many Vietnam veterans read it to find leads for jobs as prosaic as security guards. But, whatever you think of the magazine, it is hard to escape the conclusion that it was sued by Mrs. Black’s son and mother because, of all the parties to this tragedy, Soldier of Fortune was the only one with any resources.

Both Hearn, who has been convicted of Mrs. Black’s murder as well as two other killings that he arranged through his Soldier of Fortune ad, and Black, who hired him, are in prison. Hearn, himself a proponent of the blame-someone-else school, says that he would never have turned into a murderer if it had not been for Soldier of Fortune; he just couldn’t resist the people who read his ad and hired him to kill their relatives.

Conscientious publications do screen their advertising, to avoid what is tasteless or pornographic or unduly violent or illegal. After this, newspapers and magazines are likely to be even more exacting--and more nervous--until appellate courts settle the issue of media negligence, an area in which there are few precedents. But ponder this: If a publication is to be held liable for the criminal acts undertaken by its readers, using products or services advertised on its pages, then what about those menacing ads for steak knives? And ant poison? And gin?