Failure to update online story costs newspaper £60,000 in libel damages

The decision not to amend the story for more than two years, so as to reflect the outcome of the police investigation into the officer it had originally reported on, was an act of defamation that had no defence, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies ruled.

The judge said it meant readers of the online article were presented with misleading information during that period which hinted that there were still "strong grounds" to believe that former Metropolitan Police Service officer Gary Flood "was a corrupt officer and a criminal".

In June 2006 London police officer Gary Flood was identified in a Times story as the subject of a police investigation into allegations that he was paid by a consultancy acting for wealthy Russians to pass on details of extradition activity. When Flood complained the Times added a notice to the article to state that 'this article is subject to a legal complaint'. Flood was investigated and neither criminal charges nor internal disciplinary charges were brought against him. The Times was told this in September 2007 but did not publish an update to the story at the time.

In October 2009 the Times added an update to the online story to report on the outcome of the investigation, which was overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, after being told that it was obliged to do so by the Court of Appeal.

The courts had previously found that the Times was protected against liability for defamation from the date of its original story up until the outcome of the police investigation. This is because its journalism was deemed responsible during this period.

However, Flood sought damages from the Times after claiming to be defamed during the period of just over two years where the original article remained unchanged, despite the story having moved on.

Mrs Justice Nicola Davies ordered the Times to pay Flood £45,000 "to reflect the distress, anxiety and suffering" he had experienced as well as "the damage to his reputation and the need for proper vindication".

Flood was awarded a further £15,000 in aggravated damages by the judge after she said that the Times had not given consideration to how Flood's reputation could have been affected by the continued publication of the out-of-date article. Instead, she said the Times had shown itself to be unwilling to accept the police investigation's conclusions and she also criticised the way in which the paper had "persisted in its own pursuit of evidence".

"In this case the defence of justification went beyond merely supporting a meaning to the effect that there had been, during the course of the police investigation, objectively reasonable grounds for the police to investigate," Mrs Justice Nicola Davies said. "[The Times] felt no scruple about holding over [Flood] the threat of further investigations to undermine the conclusion of the police investigation in order to push [Flood] into settling on [its] term. There has been no attempt to express any regret for the anxiety and stress which [Flood] has suffered as a result of this matter hanging over him for some years."

The judge said Flood was "entitled to expect" that the Times would have amended its original story "to publish, at the very least, the outcome of the investigation". She said the fact it didn't meant there was a "need for proper vindication" to reflect the fact that Flood had lived with the original article continuing to refer to details of alleged dishonesty and corruption for two years after he had been exonerated of wrongdoing.

"[The Times] succeeded in defending publication of the article complained of up to 5 September 2007 by establishing that reporting the police investigation into [Flood] and naming him was public interest journalism," the judge said. "If there was a public interest in reporting the investigation there must be a public interest in reporting its result and it is elementary fairness to the subject to do so. The meaning which [the Times] sought to justify related only to the existence of grounds objectively justifying the investigation. Continuing to publish the story without qualification is not responsible journalism, it is not in the public interest and it is unfair to [Flood]."

The Supreme Court previously found that the Times was not liable for defaming Flood when it ran the print version of the story. This is because the publishing of the allegations about him was done responsibly and the story was in the public interest.