THE Judicial Committee of the United Kingdom Privy Council will tomorrow publish a judgement that will bring the curtain down on the libel lawsuit popular talk-show host, Eric Anthony Abrahams, filed against the publishers of the Star and 164 year-old Gleaner newspapers 16 years ago.

The judgement, which is already being celebrated in Abrahams’ camp, will determine whether or not local Appellate Court judges Ian Forte, Paul Harrison and Ransford Langrin were correct to order the Gleaner company to pay Abrahams $35 million in damages on account of a libellous story it published and re-published in its newspapers between September 17 and 19 of 1987.

The optimism which was gushing from an excited Abrahams last week is buoyed by the fact that the English law lords, whose decision will be final, did not call on Abrahams’ lawyers to reply to the Gleaner’s contention that the award was too big during the appeal, which was heard two months ago on May 19 and 20.

“That has always been an indication — when they don’t call the other side to answer — that the arguments of the first have not been accepted,” Winston Spaulding QC told the Sunday Observer. “If they had, then the opposing party would have been called upon to answer.”

However, another lawyer, who is watching the case closely with a view to using it as a guide in another libel case against the Gleaner involving a $23-million award made to accountant Leymon Strachan by a seven-member jury under the directions of then Supreme Court judge, Donald Bingham, went further than Spaulding.

“There’s no question… no doubt… he’s won hands down,” he told the Sunday Observer last week.

The United Kingdom Privy Council, Jamaica’s highest legal authority, spent two sessions listening to arguments from Lord Lester, an English lawyer who is well known in that jurisdiction for his expertise in libel law, about freedom of the press and the correct way of computing damages arising from libel.

Lester contended that the local Appellate Court was wrong two years ago when it took the view that while the method of computing damages arising from personal injury could be used as a general guide, in computing Abrahams’ damages, the key principle involved a question of how much compensation was required for the protection of his reputation.

At the end of the presentation, instead of asking Spaulding, Lord Anthony Gifford QC and Heather Rogers, another English lawyer, to rebut Lester’s argument, the law lords advised them that it was not necessary.

“We had given them written submissions beforehand, but we weren’t called on to answer anything said by Lord Lester,” Spaulding told the Sunday Observer. “… In our submissions we said the local Appellate Court should have awarded exemplary damages…. in addition to maintaining the $35-million.”

Abrahams, a former minister of tourism in the Jamaica Labour Party administration of the 1980s, was also a Rhodes Scholar. Between September 17 and 19, 1987 when the offending story was published in the Star and republished in the Gleaner, he was a tourism consultant and, according to his lawyers, enjoyed a very prestigious social status.

The lawyers argued that the libel had a devastating effect on Abrahams economically and emotionally. This was the centrepiece of the argument for aggravated and exemplary damages.

The story, which the Gleaner company got from the Associated Press, an American news service, under a contract which indemnified the service from liability arising from claims regarding its publications, placed Abrahams at the centre of a scandal which was the subject of a hearing by a US grand jury.

Abrahams sued the Gleaner for libel the following month and against the background of the Gleaner’s failure to file a defence, obtained a default judgement which entitled him to have his damage claim assessed by a jury.

The assessment hearing didn’t take place until 1996 however, due to a series of legal battles over the Gleaner’s right to be allowed to file a defence.

In 1992 when the company won the right to file the defence — essentially one of justification and qualified privilege — Abrahams proceeded to ask for further and better particulars of the allegations. This request became the subject of a further two years of litigation, culminating in the local Appellate Court’s decision to strike out the defence on the grounds that the Gleaner did not have the evidence necessary to justify it.

In 1996 when the assessment hearing took place for 11 weeks before a seven-member jury under the direction of then Supreme Court judge F A Smith, the jury returned an $80.7-million verdict. The Gleaner challenged the size of the award and persuaded the local appellate court to cut it down to $35 million in July 2000.

The 97-page judgement concluded that the Gleaner’s apology to Abrahams was inadequate and that the republication of the article entitled Abrahams to receive aggravated damages.

Dissatisfied with the result, the company used its final right of appeal to the English law lords in the hope of reducing the award further. The law lords’ decision will be put in the public domain at about 5:00 am (Jamaica time) tomorrow.

A beaming Abrahams told the Sunday Observer last week that the judgement will be read during The Breakfast Club, the early morning news and current affairs radio programme that he co-hosts with Beverly Anderson Manley on HOT 102.

After that, he said, it will be the end of the matter for him.