Sen. Stephen D. Alves is appealing the dismissal of a suit against a political opponent.

10:34 AM EST on Thursday, February 19, 2004

BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer

Sometime before July, the Rhode Island Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in a case that involves the constitutional right of a Rhode Island citizen to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The case is West Warwick state Sen. Stephen D. Alves' appeal of a lower court decision ordering him to pay almost $17,500 in legal fees to a political opponent who, together, with his brother, wrote unflattering letters to the editor about him.

In 1991, Alves filed a defamation suit in Superior Court against Alan Palazzo, a member of the Republican Town Committee in West Warwick who had run unsuccessfully for Alves' Senate seat, and Palazzo's brother, William Palazzo, of Coventry, after they criticized Alves in letters published in the Kent County Daily Times and The Providence Journal.

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The lawsuit focused on Alan Palazzo's allegations that Alves was "exerting a lot of pressure" on a local school-building committee and William Palazzo's allegations that Alves, as chairman of West Warwick's Pension Board, tried to steer pension-board funds toward an investment firm run by Todd LaScola, who was convicted in 2001 of embezzling $6.4 million from his clients.

Alves' lawsuit against William Palazzo is still pending in the Superior Court. But last summer Judge Netti C. Vogel dismissed the senator's suit against Alan Palazzo, ruling that it was an illegal Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation -- a SLAPP suit -- intended to intimidate his political foe. And she ordered the state senator to reimburse Palazzo $17,371.99 to cover what he has paid in legal fees to fight Alves' suit.

Alves is appealing the dismissal. He says Alan Palazzo's criticism of him should not be protected by the state's anti-SLAPP statute, because Alves' published statements "maliciously and falsely accused" him of being a corrupt and dishonest politician without any evidence to support "such an outrageous accusation" and the criticism falsely accuses him of criminal activity.

But Palazzo and the ACLU, which has filed a friend-of-the-court brief, say that Palazzo was exercising his protected First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and to petition the court for a redress of grievances, which covers the ability to tell the government what you do not like and want to see changed and to write a letter to the government asking for change, without fear of retaliation.

"SLAPP suits are aimed at silencing a plaintiff's opponents. The purpose of a SLAPP suit is not to win, but to intimidate the SLAPP defendant and to chill petition and/or free speech rights," say lawyers Joseph V. Cavanagh Jr. and Staci L. Kolb, representing the ACLU.

Alan Palazzo's letters to the editor are protected, says his lawyer Jeffrey S. Brenner, because they concerned "his opinions relating to public issues that were discussed at public meetings."

The Supreme Court, in a prior interpretation of Rhode Island's 1993 anti-SLAPP statute, says the law was intended to protect the "full participation by persons and organizations and robust discussions of issues of public concern" from the "disturbing increase in lawsuits brought primarily to chill the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and petition for redress of grievances."

In writing for the court in the 1996 case of Hometown Properties v. Fleming, Justice Victoria S. Lederberg, now deceased, said the anti-SLAPP law was crafted to be "consistent with the independence and individualism that led this state's earliest settlers 'to create a free community of seekers after the Truth and a haven for those persecuted elsewhere for their conscientious beliefs' . . . and they resonate with the expression inscribed on the Rhode Island statehouse dome," which, translated from the Latin, is: "Rare felicity of the times when it is permitted to think what you wish and to say what you think."