An eight-person Alabama jury needed nine days to order The New York Times to pay Kai Spears $9.25 million, which is an expensive way for a newspaper to learn that a name matters more than a deadline. Spears was an 18-year-old freshman walk-on on Alabama’s basketball team in January 2023 when reporter Billy Witz, citing an anonymous “person familiar with the case,” wrote that Spears had been a passenger in a car at the scene of a fatal shooting near campus. He hadn’t been.
The underlying shooting matters mostly as context: on Jan. 15, 2023, 23-year-old Jamea Harris was killed near Alabama’s campus, and former Tide forward Darius Miles was charged with capital murder for allegedly supplying the gun used by co-defendant Michael Lynn Davis, the alleged shooter. That’s a criminal case, working its way through a courtroom on its own timeline. What happened to Spears is a media coverage case, and the two got tangled together because a story needed a name and the Times printed the wrong one.
The person actually in the car was Cooper Lee, a student manager for the Alabama team, not a player at all. The paper corrected the record in June 2023, only after Spears filed suit; Spears had already called the original report “100% inaccurate” the day it published, which is a claim any accused person can make and which means nothing until a jury decides whether to believe it. This one did, unanimously, after nine days of testimony.
Keep Brandon Miller separate from all of this, because the case does. Miller, Spears’ teammate and a top-five prospect in that year’s NBA draft, sat for recorded video testimony describing how he brought the gun to Miles that night. Miller was never charged; prosecutors treated him as a cooperating witness, not a suspect. None of that is Spears’ story. He was a name attached to a car he never sat in, and the distance between “walk-on who wasn’t there” and “teammate who handed over the weapon” is the entire case in miniature.
Here is how the paper responded, through spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander:
“We’re disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake. We thank the jury for its service, but believe the verdict and award of damages are contrary to law and not supported by the evidence. We are reviewing our legal options.”
An honest mistake is what you call it when you transpose two digits in a phone number. Placing a real 18-year-old at the scene of a fatal shooting, on the word of a single anonymous source, under a masthead built on the premise that someone checked before it ran, is a different category of error entirely; a jury spent nine days agreeing with that distinction, and $9.25 million is what they decided the distinction was worth.
The Times’ own coverage of its own loss noted, with what reads like genuine surprise, that the paper hadn’t lost a defamation suit brought in this country in more than fifty years. That is the real subject here, not the verdict itself but the streak it ended. Fifty years of prevailing in court isn’t luck; it’s the product of institutional machinery built specifically to survive scrutiny — editors, lawyers, standards desks, whole departments whose job is making sure the paper never has to stand in front of a jury and explain how it got the basic facts wrong.
That machinery is why the Times can run an anonymous-source claim about who was in a car and reasonably expect it to hold up, because it usually does. This time it identified the wrong 18-year-old as being near a killing, printed it, and left a college kid to spend months publicly insisting he was innocent of something no one with actual charging authority had ever accused him of. The verdict isn’t really a judgment on one bad sentence. It’s a jury pricing out what it costs when the machine built to prevent this exact failure fails anyway, a figure Sportico’s legal analysts have already started dissecting for what it signals about defamation exposure going forward. Sports law professor Michael McCann framed the stakes plainly:
https://twitter.com/McCannSportsLaw/status/2090631540459937852
Getting the gist right used to be the industry’s working defense; a jury just said gist isn’t a standard, it’s an excuse.
Fifty years without a loss made for a tidy line in the paper’s institutional self-portrait, the kind of stat a profile drops to establish gravitas. It looks worse now that the streak snapped on the single fact a newspaper is supposed to get right without a lawsuit forcing the correction: who was actually in the car. That gap, between how an institution talks about itself and how it behaves once it’s wrong, is the same gap running through sports journalism eating its own credibility — the self-mythology survives right up until a jury checks the math.
Kai Spears gets $9.25 million and a college career now permanently attached to a sentence he never should have appeared in. The New York Times gets a legal team reviewing its options and a fifty-year streak it will spend the foreseeable future explaining instead of citing.
