By: Brendan Kearney

If you didn’t dig deep into Friday’s print edition or weren’t able to scale our website’s subscriber wall, you might’ve missed pretty big news in the local legal and media world yesterday: a $350,000 defamation verdict against the Baltimore City Paper.

Briefly, the story is that a federal court jury found Van Smith, a veteran journalist who’s covered Baltimore interestingly and well for years, defamed Miami restaurateur Ioannis Kafouros in a pair of articles two years ago by suggesting the Florida man was Ioannis “Crazy John” Kafouros, a Baltimore hustler who was convicted of trafficking in stolen goods before skipping town in 1999.

That’s right, the reporter said some guy was a federal fugitive when he wasn’t one. Yikes.

The City Paper ran corrections, of course, but the damage had been done. And so it seemed the non-fugitive Mr. Kafouros had a pretty solid case against Baltimore’s alt-weekly. While the amount of the award was surprisingly high, I don’t think anyone was shocked the jury awarded damages. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m told falsely stating someone is a criminal is defamation per se –- or, to borrow a phrase from the plaintiff Kafouros’ attorney, “that’s all she wrote.”

So that’s the first point: the jury got it right by finding negligence. The City Paper screwed up, as it has admitted, and this is the final proof of that.

But that said, having covered the trial, I think what happened in this case was an honest mistake – costly, but honest.

There’s a lot of back story and I can’t recap it all here, but as best I can tell from reading filings in the case and watching the beginning and end of this week’s courtroom proceedings, here’s how it happened.

Smith was doing his usual dogged reporting about Baltimore’s underworld characters — the city’s “Shadow Economy,” as the City Paper likes to call it — and he happened upon an interesting link between breaking news and a name that had receded from the headlines.

He followed up on it in several ways: he e-mailed with the U.S. Attorney’s office; he called and left a message for Crazy John’s ex-wife here in Baltimore; and after a bit of Googling and public records searching on the Internet, he called down to Mykonos Greek Restaurant in South Florida. That last call, during which he and Alexios Kafouros experienced a failure to communicate, for whatever reason, was the cornerstone of his offending blog, then larger print story. (All that’s left on the City Paper website is this.)

But, as the plaintiff’s attorneys pointed out, Smith also failed to do many other things that would’ve disproved his hypothesis and forestalled any articles or lawsuit. He didn’t ask more questions of Alexios; he didn’t call the Kafouroses back; he didn’t realize the two Ioannis Kafouroses had different middle initials; and on and on.

In hindsight, it was clear that Smith could have done a lot more to prove or disprove his story. And he has no doubt done much more on other stories and he probably will be far more careful in the future. But in this instance, he did some investigation, thought he had something, improbable though it may have been, and wanted to let the world know.

That hastiness came at a cost: listening to Smith on the stand, it was clear an otherwise good reporter just wasn’t thorough and skeptical on this occasion (and his editors weren’t skeptical and circumspect enough either), and a good-faith attempt to report important news ended in disaster. I thought to myself, Van Smith was just doing his job, not perfectly, but plausibly, and here he is in very hot water. There but for the grace of God (or my editors or good luck or whatever) go I, I thought.

Most of the time, I (and The Daily Record) am protected from defamation/libel suits because court is generally a defamation-free zone. People can say all sorts of outrageous stuff in a courtroom, and we can print it for your reading pleasure, for the most part. But given what we cover (high-stakes litigation, criminal trials, basically anything that we think is interesting or newsworthy) and given who we cover (lawyers and litigious people) we always have to be very careful about what we print.

On the other hand, there is a demand for that news all the time. Editors at TDR want daily news stories, feature stories for our Maryland Lawyer section, and blogs as often as possible. Furthermore, it all has to be fair, accurate and, ideally, well-sourced. But every story comes with a deadline, which means the reporting has to stop at some point.

All that said, however, there is no excuse for getting stuff wrong, and anyone who does that — Van Smith, me or Bob Woodward — must pay the price.

Speaking of which, I spoke on the phone earlier today with Donald Farley, publisher of the City Paper and several other alt-weeklies owned by Times-Shamrock Communications, which Farley described a medium-sized, family-owned company. I hadn’t been able to talk to him or anyone associated with the defendants last night.

Farley called the verdict “extremely disappointing” because he believed the evidence of damage was lacking.

Asked about the possibility of an appeal, Farley said, “We’re really not at that stage yet.”

He said settlement discussions fell through because of “a big difference” between what the plaintiff was requesting in compensation and what the City Paper thought the case was worth. He declined to talk about the newspaper’s insurance coverage but denied the verdict was of ultimate consequence.

“No, it’s not the end of the City Paper,” he said.