WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2008
Judge OK's Lawsuit Against NBC
A federal district judge ruled this week that the family of a man from Murphy, Texas, who killed himself may sue Dateline NBC, which was conducting an installment of its long-running
"To Catch a Predator" project.
Patricia Conradt,
sister of the dead man, Louis William Conradt, filed the suit, which alleges that the show's
host and producers are more interested in "sensationalizing and
dramatizing the Predator series for profit than in news reporting."U.S. District Judge Denny Chin wrote
that NBC engaged in conduct so extreme that no civilized society should tolerate it. The Associated Press reports:
Chin said the
lawsuit contained sufficient facts to make it plausible that the
suicide was foreseeable, that police had a duty to protect [Louis William] Conradt from
killing himself and that the officers and NBC acted with deliberate
indifference.
NBC of course says it will vigorously defend itself in court. The AP story adds:
In his
ruling, Chin said the network "placed itself squarely in the middle of
a police operation, pushing the police to engage in tactics that were
unnecessary and unwise, solely to generate more dramatic footage for a
television show."
Chin wrote that a reasonable jury could
find there was no legitimate law enforcement need for a heavily armed
SWAT team to extract a 56-year-old prosecutor from his home when he was
not accused of any violence and was not believed to have a gun.
WFFA's Byron Harris has done national award winning work on this story.
Posted at 11:56:29 AM
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