Next week will mark the 15th anniversary of the bomb explosion at Centennial Olympic Park, and lawyers for Richard Jewell and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution have been fighting for most of that time. With last week’s Georgia Court of Appeals ruling, the case could finally be at an end.
The legal battle over the newspaper’s coverage of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing has filled 11 boxes of official filings. The lawyers in the notably contentious case have made their arguments — again and again and again. Jewell, the Olympic Games security guard who brought the libel case against the newspaper in 1997, is dead, as is Kathy Scruggs, the reporter whose stories figured prominently in the litigation. Jewell suffered from various health ailments and died in 2007 at the age of 44 of heart disease. He was a deputy sheriff in Meriwether County at the time. Scruggs died in 2001 at the age of 42.
