Alabama Supreme Court affirms the $500,000 Sullivan verdict and expands the ruling to cover all 17 pending libel suits against Northern newspapers

The Alabama Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the $500,000 trial verdict against the New York Times, rejecting the Times's arguments that the First Amendment protected the advertisement and that Sullivan had not been individually identified. The court ruled that the ad's description of police conduct was "of and concerning" Sullivan as the responsible official, and that the errors in the ad were not protected by any constitutional privilege. The ruling cleared the path for the 17 pending libel suits from other Southern officials to proceed on the same legal theory, threatening Northern newspapers with hundreds of millions of dollars in combined liability.