Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps
United States Supreme Court case
Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps, 475 U.S. 767 (1986), is a United States Supreme Court case decided April 21, 1986.
Facts and prior history
Maurice S. Hepps was the principal stockholder of a corporation that had a chain of stores selling beer, soft drinks, and snacks. The Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of articles on Hepps being linked to organized crime and using some of those links to influence the State’s governmental processes. They accused Hepps of being linked to organized crime and capitalizing on that connection to influence the state legislature through articles that were published in the Philadelphia newspaper The Inquirer, owned by Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. Hepps brought a defamation suit into a Pennsylvania state court against Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. and the authors of the articles.
The Pennsylvania statute gave The Philadelphia Newspaper Inc. the burden of proof on the question of truth or falsity. The jury ruled in favor of the Philadelphia Newspaper Inc.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.