Parmiter v. Coupland

Parmiter (plaintiff), the recently former mayor of the borough of Winchester, sued Coupland and another (defendants), the publishers of the Hampshire Advertiser newspaper, over a series of articles published between November 17, 1838, and March 2, 1839. The articles accused Parmiter of partial and corrupt conduct and of ignorance of his duties as mayor and as a justice of the peace for the borough. At trial before Coleridge, J., the judge instructed the jury that there was a distinction between public and private figures, since the conduct of a person acting in a public capacity was, to some extent, public property and open to freer comment than that of a private individual, and the judge went on to define libel for the jury and left it to the jury to decide whether the newspaper articles fit that definition.