ATLANTA – The Georgia Supreme Court has ruled a lower trial court erred in denying an American Civil Liberties Union motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed by a former Glynn County public defender.
In the case of ACLU, Inc. v. Zeh, the court reversed the state Court of Appeal’s decision affirming the trial court’s denial of the ACLU’s motion and remanded the case to the Court of Appeals with the direction that it send it back to the trial court to rule on Zeh’s discovery motions.
Billy Reid Zeh is a controversial local attorney in Glynn County, who has seen his share of legal troubles. Back in 2019 he surrendered himself to police on charges of aggravated assault, robbery, battery and kidnapping.
Zeh has also been a local public defender, and in a 2018 blog post, the ACLU called him “Georgia’s crooked public defender.”
“As the public defender for Glynn County, Georgia, Reid Zeh is entrusted with advocating for the most vulnerable members of his community when they come up against the criminal justice system,” the ACLU blog post said. “Rather than do his job, however, Zeh routinely ignores his clients or worse — extorts them to enrich himself.”
The ACLU accused Zeh of charging a local man and his then-75-year-old mother $2,500 in legal services that should have been free.
“Zeh is paid a flat fee by Glynn County to represent people who can’t otherwise afford legal representation in their criminal cases,” the ACLU said, further alleging the woman and her son didn’t know Zeh could not legally or ethically require payment from them.
Zeh sued the ACLU for defamation. The ACLU wanted to dismiss Zeh’s lawsuit as meritless, and said Zeh could not show the blog post was published with actual malice.
But in an opinion published Monday, Georgia Supreme Chief Justice David Nahmias said the standard of actual malice does apply in this case.
“The facts set forth in the defamation case pleadings and affidavits show that Zeh was appointed to his position to provide public defense services to all misdemeanor cases in State Court, and as a matter of law, he had the responsibility for determining whether or not a defendant in a misdemeanor case was entitled to a public defender because of indigency,” Nahmias wrote. “The proper provision of constitutionally required legal representation for indigent criminal defendants in Glynn County’s misdemeanor cases is a matter in which the public has an independent interest.”
Despite his arguments that the ACLU’s blog post relied on untrustworthy allegations made against him by plaintiffs in a separate, federal case and that the ACLU should have further investigated the veracity of those allegations by checking public court records, the Supreme Court said the allegations were not published recklessly.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.