DENVER-
A lawsuit filed by a former college student challenging state libel laws, which allow for criminal charges, has been sent back to district court to decide whether a prosecutor can be sued.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a prosecutor who reviewed a search warrant affidavit of the student’s home did not qualify for absolute immunity, which applies during judicial proceedings. It sent the case back to district court to decide whether she was entitled to qualified immunity, which applies to government workers.
The case involves former University of Northern Colorado student Thomas Mink, who began releasing the Web-based “The Howling Pig” in 2003. Greeley police seized Mink’s computer after Professor Junius Peake complained about a spoof of him in the journal.
Believing he would be prosecuted for libel, Mink filed his lawsuit in 2004 seeking to have Colorado’s libel statute ruled unconstitutional.
Prosecutors in Greeley later said they did not intend to prosecute Mink, but he pressed on with his lawsuit.
The appeals court on Monday agreed with a lower court that ruled he had no standing to continue to sue, but it disagreed with whether Susan Knox, a deputy district attorney, was protected from being sued by absolute immunity.
Not resolved is Mink’s arguments that the 1800s-era state law that can put people in jail for the content of their speech or writing should be thrown out. The law allows criminal prosecution for speech “tending to blacken the memory of one who is dead” or to “expose the natural defects of one who is alive, and thereby to expose him to public hatred, contempt or ridicule.”
