From Polk County Pub. Co. v. Coleman, decided Friday by the Texas Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
In June 2020, a small newspaper in Polk County ran a story criticizing a local assistant district attorney named Tommy Coleman. Most of the article criticized the Williamson County District Attorney's office, where Coleman previously worked, for its involvement in the infamous wrongful conviction of Michael Morton.
Among the article's claims about Coleman was the statement that he "assisted with the prosecution of Michael Morton" while a prosecutor in Williamson County. The 1987 conviction of Michael Morton, which involved prosecutorial misconduct in the handling of evidence, happened long before Coleman started practicing law. Morton was exonerated in 2011 after spending nearly 25 years in prison.
Coleman sued for defamation, claiming that the article's statement that he "assisted with the prosecution of Michael Morton" was false and defamatory. At this stage of the proceedings, he does not challenge the accuracy of anything else in the article. The article described an episode in which Coleman, while a prosecutor for Williamson County, was heard in the courtroom during a post-conviction hearing mocking requests by Morton's attorneys for DNA testing of the piece of evidence that eventually exonerated Morton: "'Ewww! Bloody bandana! Bloody bandana,' Coleman is reported as saying in a demeaning tone during a hearing in September 2011." This regrettable episode, the veracity of which Coleman does not contest at this stage of the case, was the only factual detail the article offered to describe the way in which Coleman "assisted with the prosecution of Michael Morton."
The defendants now contend, among other arguments, that the challenged statement is not actionably false. As explained in more detail below, we do not determine the truth or falsity of the article's statement that Coleman "assisted with the prosecution of Michael Morton" by asking whether the statement is a legally precise characterization of the role Coleman played as an attorney in the sad saga of Michael Morton's prosecution and exoneration.
Instead, this Court's precedent requires that we judge the truth or falsity of an allegedly defamatory statement by identifying the "gist" of what the statement conveys about the plaintiff to a reasonable reader of the entire article. If the gist of the challenged statement, within the context of the article as a whole, is true, then the statement is considered substantially true and therefore not actionable—even if the statement errs in the details.
As explained below, we conclude that, in its context, the article's claim that Coleman "assisted with the prosecution of Michael Morton" was substantially true given Coleman's public involvement in his office's efforts to keep Morton behind bars by resisting DNA testing of the "bloody bandana." The statement is therefore not actionably defamatory, and Coleman's claims should be dismissed.
An excerpt from the court's legal analysis:
