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Olympic Park Guard Jewell's Death Leaves Unresolved Defamation Suit
Fulton County Daily Report
August 30, 2007
Richard Jewell's name will be linked indelibly to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing -- first as a hero, then as a suspect hounded by federal investigators and the media and finally, years later, as a hero once more.
Jewell, the part-time security guard who discovered the deadly bomb secreted in a backpack under a park bench during the Olympics, died Wednesday. He was 44.
Jewell's death leaves unresolved a 10-year-old libel and defamation suit against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution stemming from the international media coverage prompted by the park bombing investigation.
Augusta, Ga., media attorney David E. Hudson said that Georgia law allows a substitution for a deceased party in civil cases. Jewell is survived by his wife, Dana, and his mother, Bobbie.
The case stems from an anonymously sourced news story three days after the bombing, when the Atlanta newspaper became the first to name Jewell as the focus of the federal authorities' investigation of the bombing.
Those early unsourced reports, which the newspaper immediately shared with CNN, became the basis for the ongoing libel litigation, which has now outlasted both Jewell and AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs, who co-authored the stories that first identified Jewell as a suspect and became a defendant in Jewell's litigation. Scruggs died at her home in 2001.
Jewell's death -- from kidney problems, according to a coroner quoted by The Associated Press -- came just five months before his case against the AJC was scheduled to go to trial in front of Fulton County State Court Judge John R. Mather.
Reached by cell phone in upstate New York on Wednesday, Jewell's long-time attorney L. Lin Wood Jr. said he was too shaken to discuss his client's unexpected death.
"I can't even talk about it," said the lawyer, who learned of Jewell's death Wednesday and had no details about its cause. "I knew from talking to some folks yesterday that he had health problems … but I didn't expect to get a call today that he had died. I can't even talk about it. I can't even think. I'm just trying to get on a plane and get back."
Wood has always insisted that if he could ever get Jewell's case before a jury, the unassuming, plain-spoken, small-time police officer and security guard would carry the day against the big-city newspaper that made Jewell a goat and then a kind of pop-culture icon whose besmirched name surfaced repeatedly in television shows ranging from "Law & Order" to "Saturday Night Live."
The lawyer was fond of saying that, in front of a jury, "The only clout you need in the Richard Jewell case is Richard Jewell."
Jewell and his mother were subjected to a series of federal search warrants of their homes and property immediately following the Olympic bombing. Three months after the bombing, in October 1996, then-U.S. Attorney Kent B. Alexander issued a statement saying Jewell was no longer a federal target in the bombing investigation and that the intense international publicity was "neither designed nor desired by the FBI."
It would be another nine years before Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-government, anti-abortion zealot, pleaded guilty to the bombing. Rudolph, now serving life without parole in federal prison, not only confessed to planting the Olympic Park bomb, which killed one and injured more than 100 others, but also three other bombs in Atlanta and in Birmingham, Ala.
Rudolph eluded authorities by hiding out in the mountains of North Carolina for five years before he was finally caught.
Throughout the pendency of Jewell's civil case, Wood has asserted that Jewell's suit against the AJC was not about whether Jewell was a suspect in the 1996 Olympic park bombing. Instead, it was about whether the newspaper's coverage, once the AJC identified Jewell as the focus of the bombing investigation, libeled Jewell by reporting information that -- according to Wood -- all but named his client as the likely bomber.
Wood has always asserted that the newspaper's responsibility extended beyond accurately reporting and transcribing what investigators may have said. Instead, he has argued, AJC reporters also had a responsibility -- dictated by U.S. Supreme Court libel rulings -- to find out whether what they were being told was, in fact, true before they printed it.
AJC lawyer Peter C. Canfield has always held that AJC reporters accurately recorded what anonymous investigators told them about Jewell, and that the First Amendment guarantees the newspaper's absolute right to take what investigators said at face value and print it, even if investigators ultimately got it wrong. On Wednesday, Canfield could not be reached for comment about Jewell's death.
Wood has, over the past decade, settled separate defamation litigation on Jewell's behalf stemming from media reports linking him to the bombing with NBC, CNN, Atlanta's WKLS-FM 96 Rock, Piedmont College (whose president, Ray Cleere, first notified the FBI that they should look investigate Jewell, a former college employee), the New York Post, Time Magazine and WABC-AM in New York.
Last year, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue honored Jewell at a ceremony at the State Capitol, proclaiming Jewell's heroism in notifying authorities of the Olympic Park bomb before it detonated, and then helping to clear the park of hundreds of spectators in the minutes before the explosion.
Fulton County Daily Report Staff Reporter Alyson M. Palmer contributed to this report.
