The 42-page opinion - which the justices took 18 months to issue - leaves physician Michael H. Jensen with just under $700,000, including attorney fees. In reducing the award, the high court cited a missed time limit for filing the lawsuit and a lack of evidence submitted to a Utah County jury during the five-week trial.
"We're very pleased," said KTVX attorney Robert Anderson. "The length of the opinion certainly includes a rather definitive statement by the court."
At issue were a series of three broadcasts by KTVX in 1995 and 1996 alleging Jensen illegally prescribed the diet drug combination fen-phen to reporter Mary Sawyers without giving her a proper checkup. The report also showed Jensen saying he might be able to give her Dexedrine, a drug not approved for weight loss.
Sawyers secretly taped her appointments while posing as a patient.
Jensen filed a lawsuit against Sawyers and the station, claiming he was fired from his job as a family practitioner and lost his insurance privileges with Intermountain Health Care after the first report.
When a third story aired, grouping him with other physicians accused of homicide, sexual abuse and disfigurement, Jensen says he was forced to seek employment in a nursing home.
The state's Department of Occupational and Professional Licensing filed a disciplinary petition against Jensen and the physician agreed to a public reprimand for violating prescription laws. But a Utah County jury determined Jensen's privacy had been violated with the hidden camera, and that Sawyers' stories had cast him in a false light.
Attorneys for Jensen point to outtakes that never aired. In one, Jensen tells Sawyers he has since learned he could not prescribe Dexedrine. Another shows a nurse taking her blood pressure.
The jury awards related to Jensen's claims of invasion of privacy stand. The justices said whether a person is entitled to privacy in a situation is a "relative and highly-fact dependant matter" that doesn't lend itself to a single appellate court definition.
But the high court said a judge should have dismissed the "false light" claims before they ever went to a jury.
One-year time limits that apply for filing defamation claims also apply to false light claims, they held.
The justices also ruled jurors were presented with no evidence that the third broadcast resulted in economic losses for Jensen. The physician voluntarily left the clinic he was working at for a nursing home after his hours were cut, they said.
Dale Gardiner, who represented Jensen in the appeal, was not immediately available for comment. Sawyers no longer works as a journalist, Anderson said, and left KTVX prior to the trial.
