Reddick v. Craig’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
2 district · 12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently October 2004
2 district · 12 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc. · St. Amant v. Thompson · Hutchinson v. Proxmire
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Although the language in both letters is vehement, caustic, and at times unpleasantly sharp, the critical assertions are nevertheless couched in terms of apparency, i.e., “I haven’t checked the spending of city and grant monies in 1978, but if we assume PBR’s income from those sources was as budgeted....” (emphasis added) In all but one instance where the word “take” is employed, it is enclosed in quotation marks. Examining the letters in their entirety, we conclude the words “take,” “rapist,” “serious violation of commitment not to exceed the counties budget,” “parlay,” “an excess take,” and “swindle,” read in context, can only be understood as rhetorical hyperbole meant to express Craig’s opinion that,, insofar as Reddick and PBR were concerned, the county taxpayers were simply not getting their money’s worth. See Lane v. Arkansas Valley Publishing Co. [ 675 P.2d 747 (Colo.App.1983) ] supra; see also Cinquanta v. Burdett, 154 Colo. 37 , 388 P.2d 779 (1964). Furthermore, these letters were published by the Herald in the section entitled “Our Readers Say” where one would expect to find expressions of opinion. In our view, Craig did no more than use this forum to opine that the county taxpayers were paying too much for the services performed by Reddick and PBR. Even if it is assumed that the underlying facts which provide the basis for Craig’s opinion were erroneous, these facts were fully disclosed in each of the letters. Thus, because his opinions were not based on undisclos”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“One must admire the skill of anyone who can parlay a $35,000 job into over a quarter million dollars in one year, haul a large portion of it out of the county to Denver and beyond, and leave a local audience applauding the performance. That is an achievement which is indeed FASTASTIC [sic], I suppose there are rape cases in which the rapist is so skillful that he leaves the victim smiling and calling for more. In the case at hand, the elected city and county officials seem to be smiling and calling for more. But it is the taxpayers of La Plata County who have been had.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.