#BRAUN V. SOLDIER OF FORTUNE PROFESSIONAL#
It read: "GUN FOR HIRE: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires jobs. The advertisement in question here was submitted in June 1985 by Michael Savage of Knoxville, Tenn.
And all they have to do is just look at the language of the advertisement." 'All Jobs Considered' Meyerson said: "This decision says that a publication with this history of criminal activity linked to its advertisements has a duty to the public to try to make sure that such things don't occur.
Noting that in the last 10 years more than a half-dozen cases of contract murder have been linked to Soldier of Fortune, Mr. Meyerson said, but merely requires that a publication examine the language of an advertisement to determine whether it is a threat to the public. The current decision does not change that, Mr. He said that most court decisions had long determined that publications were not the main guarantors of the truth of their advertisements.
#BRAUN V. SOLDIER OF FORTUNE FREE#
McColl's suggestion that the 11th Circuit decision threatened commercial free speech by applying broadly to liability for everything advertised from used cars to dates. That earlier case, in Texas, also involved a Soldier of Fortune advertisement that resulted in a contract killing but the judges there found that its language was too ambiguous to lead to the immediate conclusion that the person was advertising services as a contract killer. Meyerson, a University of Baltimore Law School professor who is an expert in First Amendment cases, said the case might very well go to the Supreme Court because the judges' decision conflicted with one last year by appellate judges of the Fifth Circuit. Dubina, went on to say that requiring publishers to examine advertisements against such a standard did not amount to a significant burden that would "chill" protected commercial free speech or hurt a publication's advertising revenues and thereby threaten its existence and noncommercial free speech. The appeals panel found that publishers were liable "for compensatory damages for negligently publishing a commercial advertisement where the ad on its face, and without the need for investigation, makes it apparent that there is a substantial danger of harm to the public." It also highlighted what liability, if any, publishers have for harmful events that are linked to items in their classified ad columns. The case raised the question of whether commercial speech enjoys the nearly absolute First Amendment protections accorded noncommercial and political speech. The 2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, published Monday, upheld a $4.3 million damage award to the sons of the victim, Richard Braun of suburban Atlanta.Ī spokesman for Soldier of Fortune, Alex McColl, said today, "We're disappointed and think that this decision is a hazard to the print media generally." He said the magazine, which is based in Boulder, Colo., and has a circulation of 90,000, had not decided whether to appeal the ruling further. In a case that raised First Amendment issues, a Federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that Soldier of Fortune magazine was liable in the contract murder of an man whose killers were hired through a "sinister" and suggestive classified advertisement in the magazine.