Shane Ladner, a former Cherokee County, Georgia deputy, was convicted of lying earlier this month about his Purple Heart Medal that he claimed that he was awarded for his service in Operation Just Cause.
That claimed award put him and his wife on a fateful collision course with a train when they were riding on a float in Midland, Texas – that collision cost his wife her leg.
Fox 5 in Atlanta discovered that he was actually in high school during that battle and couldn’t have been awarded a Purple Heart. Ladner sued them for libel last year ahead of his trial, but the DeKalb County Judge Alvin Wong dismissed the case against Fox 5.
According to Law.com, Ladner attempted to get an Appeals Court to overturn the dismissal of his civil case.
The panel—which included Judges Anne Barnes and Amanda Mercier—first determined that Ladner was a limited purpose public figure, in part because of national coverage of the accident, the investigations resulting from the [Midland, Texas] fatal train collision, and the victims’ status as wounded veterans. Ladner also voluntarily and frequently sought public recognition for his military service by participating in the Texas event honoring war heroes and then, after the accident, by giving numerous interviews, appearing at fundraisers for his wife and himself and filing a personal injury lawsuit, McMillian wrote.
The public figure determination set a high bar for Ladner’s defamation claim, requiring him to prove the television station reported false information and did so with malice, McMillian wrote. After listing multiple sources and records that reporter Randy Travis relied on, McMillian also noted that Ladner admitted that he lied about serving in Panama, where he claimed he was wounded. She also noted Travis’ repeated efforts to give Ladner and his lawyer an opportunity to counter his findings.
Ladner did serve in the Army, but he was still in high school during the Panama invasion.
“The evidence shows no knowledge on the part of Fox 5 or Travis that his reports were false; to the contrary, Travis asserted that he believed at the time and continued to believe they were accurate,” the opinion says. “Moreover, the extent of Travis’s investigation and his reporting of Ladner’s explanations for any discrepancies in his record demonstrate that they did not recklessly disregard whether the reports were false.”
Ladner just doesn’t give up. He claimed, after Fox 5 announced their revelation, that instead of being wounded in Panama, he was wounded during drug interdiction operations in Central America. He also claimed that the National Personnel Records Center wouldn’t have a record of his secret Purple Heart Medal, and that records would be at Fort Benning, Georgia and at a cancer hospital in Panama, but after more than three years, neither Ladner nor his lawyer could produce those orders – only a forged DD214 discharge certificate.
