Oliver Stone Vindicated

Director Oliver Stone breathed a sigh of relief on Monday when a Louisiana state district court judge threw out a civil lawsuit that alleged Stone and his film Natural Born Killers were responsible for a young couple's violent rampage that left store clerk Patsy Byers paralysed. Judge Robert Morrison decided that the suit, brought by Byers' parents, had no foundation in law since the US Constitution's First Amendment protected both Stone's rights and those of the film's distributor Warner Brothers. In 1995, Sarah Edmondson, the teen-age daughter of an Oklahoma judge, and her boyfriend Ben Darras robbed the Pontchatoula, Louisiana, store where Byers worked. During the robbery, part of an inter-state crime spree, Edmondson shot Byers in the neck. She was left a quadriplegic and died of cancer two years later. Edmondson and Darras, who killed a man the day before his girlfriend shot Patsy Byers, claimed in their defence that they had watched Natural Born Killers repeatedly before embarking on their murderous road trip. "This is a significant victory for the protection of artistic expression," said Robert Schwartz, an attorney for Warner Bros. parent company Time Warner. "The shooting was horrible and tragic, but there is no conceivable basis to blame Oliver Stone or Warner Brothers for the crazed acts of the misguided." Joe Simpson, attorney for the Byers family, retorted that the ruling may still be appealed.