Baxter Springs ? Tucked along historic Route 66 in southeastern Kansas, the Baxter Springs News is embroiled in a legal fight that could test First Amendment press freedoms in Kansas.

At the crux of the battle is the city’s criminal defamation ordinance.

Baxter Springs publisher Larry Hiatt along with a columnist and a former candidate Monday won the dismissal of criminal defamation charges for a newspaper ad and a column published during city elections.

“This is truly a First Amendment case. This is a case where government is trying to quiet the press and they are using criminal law to do it,” Hiatt said.

But the victory, based on a legal technicality regarding a court deadline, may be short-lived. The judge’s order allows the city to refile the charges if it obtains a special prosecutor.

The day after the ruling, City Clerk Donna Wixon whose claim that the newspaper smeared her first generated the defamation charges said the city would get a special prosecutor and the charges would be refiled.

Kansas is one of few states in which people can be charged with the crime of knowingly spreading false information about someone. The misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail and $2,500 fine.

Efforts to repeal or weaken the state’s criminal defamation law failed in the Legislature this year.

The defamation case is not the only criminal matter facing the staff of this twice-weekly newspaper either.

Baxter Springs News publisher Larry Hiatt uses a computer to lay out his award-winning newspaper at the paper's office in Baxter Springs. Hiatt is at odds with city officials in the southeast Kansas town regarding his newspaper's coverage of alleged city corruption and claims city officials have retaliated by filing lawsuits against the paper and its employees.

The Baxter Springs News’ advertising manager, Mary Broyles, faces a theft by deception charge for allegedly stealing advertising inserts from the competing weekly newspaper, the Baxter Springs Citizen.

Charges, countercharges

Hiatt contends those two criminal cases are part of a pattern of harassment by city officials of the newspaper and its staff to run the paper out of business after its coverage of controversial stories.

Wixon and Baxter Springs Mayor Art Roberts flatly denied that accusation saying the newspaper’s legal troubles have nothing to do with the city.

“They have to be accountable for the stuff they are saying and printing, just like I have to be held accountable,” Wixon said. “I have worked hard for the position I have in my career. I take a lot of pride in my work, and I feel they have taken that away from me.”

Wixon said she filed the complaint as a private citizen, not as city clerk. She said the News never has contacted her to get her side of the story. The publicity about her has “torn my family apart,” she said.

“You have to understand, this is Small Town, USA,” Roberts said. Everybody here knows everybody.”

City Prosecutor Larry Myers did not return a call for comment.

‘This hateful person’

In the defamation case, the initial charges stemmed from a column written by Ron Thomas that criticized Wixon and Roberts, who was then running for mayor. The advertisement, paid for by City Council candidate Charles How Jr., also attacked Roberts and mentioned Wixon.

Wixon said she felt defamed when the ad called her a “hateful clerk.”

“They have made the people in this community look at me in a different way that is unfair,” she said. “People actually think I am this hateful person.”

As for the theft case, Broyles denied stealing the advertising inserts. She said the advertiser who owned the inserts told her they had been shipped by mistake to the Citizen and asked her to pick them up and put them in the News instead.

“It is very upsetting. This is my hometown,” Broyles said. “Everybody knows me.”

Carolyn Ashford, publisher of the Citizen, declined to discuss her criminal complaint against the News.

She called it a “business disagreement between two newspapers.”

Wixon and Ashford said the city had nothing to do with that criminal theft case against the News’ advertising manager.

That case has been scheduled for trial June 29.

Community news

When Hiatt and his wife, Sharon, started the twice-weekly Baxter Springs News in August 1998, the couple planned to fill its pages with all the sports, club meetings, school and local events that are the mainstay of community newspapers.

But the paper’s news and opinion pages also have carried much more exposing possible misuse of taxpayer funds, questionable city practices and other alleged corruption, which the paper’s publisher contends is a carry over from the city’s wild days as a bootlegger’s haven.

Hiatt insisted his newspapering style was not confrontational.

“I’ve never run a newspaper like that in my life it’s just that here there is a lot of trouble to be made,” Hiatt said.

The 2,200 readers of the Baxter Springs News have learned through its pages that their local sheriff who campaigned for election on his record as a veteran was dishonorably discharged for deserting his post.

The story, which Hiatt pursued through a Freedom of Information query of military records, won the newspaper an award from the Kansas Press Assn.

Hiatt also published a city worker’s diary detailing almost 20 years of incidents whereby city officials allegedly used city staff and materials for their private use.

The News also printed city credit card bills, which included such charges as a $170 bill run up at Hooter’s in Wichita.

Roberts said his personal experience with the paper during the mayoral election had been that it printed half-truths and rumors.

“It is a different situation for me because I was running for public office I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. “I don’t remember them printing anything about me that was totally true.”