CRIMINAL LIBEL AND THE INTERNET

摘要

The most famous criminal defamation case in US history was the prosecution of John Peter Zenger in 1735. Zenger was printer of New York Weekly Journal, which had criticized Britain's colonial governor of New York, William Crosby, for removing the Chief Justice of New York after he had ruled against the governor in a case. Crosby initiated a seditious libel prosecution against Zenger even though the offending words had actually been written by the Journal's founder and editor, James Alexander. The Zenger case was tried under English common law, which did not allow truth as a defense to the crime of libel. The rationale for this rule was that, if the libel was true, its sting would be even more intense and have an even greater tendency to incite violence. After Zenger's first two lawyers were disbarred by the new Chief Justice, Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton urged the jury to ignore the common law rule in the judge's instruction and acquit Zenger on the ground that the statement in the Journal was true. The jury's willingness to follow Hamilton's lead is generally considered one of the first cases of jury nullification in the Americas.