By: E&P Staff A Cook County (Ill.) Circuit Court judge rejected a former prosecutor's demand for a new trial in a libel suit he lost to the Chicago Tribune last year, the newspaper reported today.
Former DuPage County prosecutor Thomas Knight complained that the trial judge made errors that denied him a fair trial. The Tribune reported that claim included allowing the newspaper to bring up reports by other news organization that Knight said portrayed him in a negative light.
Knight sued the Tribune and reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong over three paragraphs in a 1999 investigative series called "Trial & Error--How Prosecutors Sacrifice Justice To Win." (Armstrong, who is now an investigative reporter with The Seattle Times, was dismissed as a defendant before the case reached the jury.)
In the disputed paragraphs, the Tribune reported that Knight had told an evidence expert to "keep his mouth shut" about a particular potential bit of evidence in a murder case. While the article attributed that quote to grand jury testimony by the expert, in fact the expert never testified before the grand jury. Instead, a private investigator made that claim. At trial, it emerged that the correct attribution had been changed during the long editing process.
Knight said he told the expert "not to discuss the matter with anyone," and argued that characterizing that statement as an instruction to "keep his mouth shut" was "false in a material way."
After a three-week trial last May, the jury found in favor of the Tribune and Possley.
Knight and six other DuPage County law enforcement officials were accused in 1999 of conspiring to frame a wrongfully convicted man in a 1983 murder case. All were acquitted at trial.
The libel case -- the first against the Tribune to actually go to trial in 39 years -- was detailed in a "Newspaper Beat"
column on the E&P Web site last June.
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