Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374 (1967)

On September 11 and 12, 1952, three escaped convicts held James Hill, his wife, and their five children hostage for 19 hours in their home in Whitemarsh, Pennsyl-vania. The convicts were subsequently involved in a highly publicized encounter with the police, and two of the three convicts were killed. The Hill family quickly became front-page news. James Hill stressed that none of them had been hurt, molested, or exposed to violence and discouraged any further coverage of their story. The family moved to Connecticut soon after.
In the spring of 1953, Joseph Hayes published a novel entitled The Desperate Hours, in which a family of four is held hostage by three escaped convicts in their suburban home. Unlike the Hill family’s experience, the story’s family is exposed to violence by the convicts. The father and son are beaten, and the daughter experiences verbal sexual insult. The topic was later made into a play, also entitled The Desperate Hours.
Time, Inc.’s Life magazine printed an article about the play, calling it a reenact-ment of the Hill incident. The article appeared in Life in February 1955. It was titled “True Crime Inspires Tense Play,” with the subtitle “The ordeal of a family trapped by convicts gives Broadway a new thriller, ‘The Desperate Hours.’” The text of the article reads, “Three years ago Americans all over the country read about the desperate ordeal of the James Hill family, who were held prisoners in their home outside Philadelphia by three escaped convicts. Later they read about it in Joseph Hayes’s novel, The Desperate Hours, inspired by the family’s experience. Now they can see the story reenacted in Hayes’s Broadway play based on the topic.”
The article also used photographs of scenes that had been staged in the Hill’s former home. The pictures included a reenactment of the son being roughed up by one of the convicts, labeled “brutish convict”; a picture of the daughter biting the hand of a convict to make him drop a gun, captioned “daring daughter”; and one of the father throwing his gun through the door after a “brave try” to save his family is foiled. The appellee, James Hill, alleged that the Life article gave a knowingly false impression that the play was an accurate depiction of the Hill incident. Hill sued Life magazine for damages under a New York statute that provides a cause of action to a person whose name or picture is used by another without consent for purposes of trade or advertising. Life magazine, the appellant, claimed that the article was about a subject of general interest and was published in good faith.
The jury awarded James Hill $50,000 compensatory and $25,000 punitive damages. On appeal, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court ordered a new trial as to damages but sustained the jury verdict of liability. At the new trial on damages, a jury was waived, and the court awarded $30,000 compensatory damages without any punitive damages. The court did not feel that James Hill’s private life had been intruded on and did not feel that Time, Inc. published the article for financial gain. Time, Inc. was still found liable, but the court felt the damages awarded to Hill were excessive. The court declined to hold the New York “Right of Privacy” statute unconstitutional. The court concluded that the instructions to the jury were fatally defective because they failed to advise that a verdict for the plaintiffs could be predicated only on a finding of knowing or reckless falsity in the publication of the Life article. The court explained that absent a finding of such malicious intent on the part of a developer, press statements are protected under the First Amendment, even if they are otherwise false or inaccurate.