I'm The Ghost of La Grange

I am the widow of Dr. Samuel H. Black. My husband and I built La Grange together in the early 1800s. Now a developer and his paid lackeys want to destroy this wonderful piece of Delaware's heritage. They are assaulting the history of this property, ignoring or minimizing the environmental degradation that will be caused by their plans, and have filed an unsuccessful SLAPP suit against some of the people who are willing to stand up and publicly insist our government enforce all existing historical and environmental laws.

If what follows below gets you mad, please e-mail HistoricGlasgow@earthlink.net and offer to help. Even if you have already signed our petition, FOHG can use both a little of your time and and little of your money. Bookmark this site and revisit it for updates. It is not too late to to stop this sort of abuse of power that is all to common in DE these days.

SLAPP Suit Summary - Part I

If you don't know by now, SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. SLAPPs are an abuse of the courts and are often frivolous, using the court as an instrument in a political dispute. They shift the nature of a controversy from open public debate to narrow two-party litigation. While more than three-quarters of such suits are ultimately lost by the plaintiff, they can, if allowed to run their course, result in one side of a public policy issue being penalized for their participation in government. SLAPP suits typically run 2-3 yrs. and end with the plaintiff failing to prove his case in court, while the defendants are left with large legal bills.

In December 2005, FOHG members Susan and David Arday were impleaded into an existing Delaware lawsuit filed by developer Stephen Nichols, because they publicly opposed his plans to develop Susan's grandmother's historic farm property, La Grange, located in Glasgow, DE. Although the original breach of contract lawsuit was filed in November 2005 against the four sellers of the La Grange farm (including Susan's mom), almost all of the plaintiff's subsequent legal activity was directed at Friends of Historic Glasgow (FOHG) and the Ardays. While the Ardays were named as defendants, FOHG member Nancy Willing was subpoenaed, deposed, and forced to turn over many hundreds of e-mails and other documents concerning FOHG's activities. It seems clear that the only purpose of the original suit was to open a back door to file a SLAPP suit, in order to distract the judge from seeing the true nature of the suit.

On 17 February 2006, Delaware Court of the Chancery's Vice Chancellor Leo Strine refused to consider the Ardays' initial motion to dismiss the SLAPP suit on First Amendment grounds, and allowed ''merits-based discovery'' to proceed. In my opinion, Strine was overly sympathetic to the developer's specious claim that the Ardays were acting as ''agents'' on behalf of seller Joanne Lewis (Susan's mom), despite a lack of evidence to support such a claim. Instead, the Ardays were also forced to produce hundreds of documents and e-mails about their activities within FOHG, and were deposed (for the first time) in early May.

Then, in late May 2006, Strine refused to consider a second dismissal motion, and instead allowed the developer to amend his complaint against the Ardays, and to make copies of and search their entire computer hard drives for evidence the plaintiff claimed was ''missing.'' All the invasive search did was cost the defendants more aggravation, time, and money. The developer's lawyers refused to restrict their search terms in a reasonable manner, and instead dumped a total of over 30,000 documents out of the computer drives (including the childrens' computer drive). After more wrangling, defense attorney David Finger ended up reviewing about half of those for relevance to the case. But to no surprise, better than 95% if them were irrelevant, and almost all the rest had been produced by the Ardays in the original round of discovery. Because of the computer search being allowed by the Court, the Ardays had to undergo a second round of depositions in December 2006.

SLAPP Suit Summary - Part II

In classic SLAPP suit fashion, the plaintiff's lawyers took every tack they could to delay and extend discovery. While accusing the Ardays before the judge of being uncooperative, the plaintiff refused to answer the interrogatories posed to him with much beyond repetitive legal boilerplate obfuscations and denials. During his September 2006 deposition, most of Nichols' answers were to the effect of ''I don't know,'' or ''My lawyers are still looking into it.'' He couldn't produce one single receipt to support the more than $1 million in damages he was claiming, or show how the Ardays' actions had directly harmed him.

On the other hand, this suit consumed over 600 hours of the Ardays' combined time over its course, and their full legal bill ran into six figures. Meanwhile, FOHG was seriously hurt, as many participants faded away to avoid being targeted in the suit and suffering similar expense and aggravation. Thus, the SLAPP suit had its intended chilling effect.

A third motion for dismissal was filed at the end of November 2006, and a hearing was held on 6 February 2007. V.C. Strine ruled that the plaintiff had failed to prove his case, and dismissed the entire suit without seriously applying DE's rather weak anti-SLAPP law. However, he left the door open for the developer to refile a defamation claim, which he did on 19 February, beginning round two of the SLAPP. The developer also appealed the dismissal of the remaining charges against the other defendants, in order to keep the entire suit going in any way possible, but the DE Supreme Court rejected that appeal as interlocutory.

On 25 May 2007, V.C. Strine exercised discretion and dismissed the defamation case from Chancery Court, in response to the Ardays' request for a jury trial, which is not available in Chancery Court. The plaintiff subsequently failed to transfer the case to Superior Court within the 60-day time limit, and the case was dismissed, with prejudice, on 10 Aug 2007. The Arday's then appealed the lower court's failure to apply DE's anti-SLAPP statute to the case and award them their attorney fees, while Nichols cross-appealed the dismissal before trial. The ACLU submitted an amicus curiae brief on the Arday's behalf, because allowing a SLAPP suit to run for months without due consideration of DE's anti-SLAPP law has significant First Amendment implications.

On 26 March 2008, the Supreme Court of the State of Delaware held a hearing on the appeal and cross-appeal. Two days later, it remanded the matter to the Court of the Chancery for its further consideration. V.C. Strine was instructed to issue a written opinion further explaining the basis of the actions he took when ruling from the bench in February 2007. Strine issued that written opinion in early June, and despite another round of briefings, the Supreme Court affirmed without comment Strine’s written decision in early August.

Strine's February 2007 bench ruling and his subsequent 2008 written decision essentially called the case a draw (without using that word), leaving Nichols with no damage award and the Ardays with no compensation for their legal expenses. Strine awarded the Ardays about $2100 in court costs, which Nichols eventually paid, but that did little to cover the full legal bill.

To me, the the big winner in this case was Nichols' pro-development law firm (Saul Ewing), as they gained a narrowed interpretation of the anti-SLAPP statute. Strine said that if a plaintiff can allege some sort of familial conspiracy then it's not a real SLAPP suit, and the plaintiff is entitled to the opportunity to harass his opponents in court. Expect another SLAPP suit along these lines in DE, soon.