A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, finding several key issues “challenged the reliability” of the original results.
The Second US Circuit Court of Appeals criticized the trial judge for dismissing the case before the jury had reached a verdict. The jury was allowed to continue deliberating before finally finding the newspaper not liable in February 2022.
“Unfortunately, several key issues at trial — specifically, erroneous exclusion of evidence, inaccurate jury instructions, legally incorrect responses to juror questions mid-deliberation, and juror learning during deliberations on the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal verdict — impugn the reliability of the verdict,” the opinion said.
The New York Times headquarters is pictured on Eighth Avenue in New York, February 5, 2008.
Gary Hershorn / Reuters, FILE
Shane Vogt, attorney for Palin, said in a statement: “Governor Palin is very pleased with today’s decision, which is an important step forward in the process of holding publishers responsible for content that misleads readers and the general public. The field is level, and Governor Palin is looking forward to- intended to present his case to a jury who was ‘given the relevant evidence and instructed on the law’ as stated in the opinion of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Palin sued the Times and its former opinion editor, James Bennet, over an editorial published on June 14, 2017. The piece, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” linked the 2011 shooting of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to a digital graphic of crosshairs. Democratic congressional districts were published in March 2010 by Palin’s political action committee. The relationship between map crosshairs and shooting has never been established. However, at the time of editorial, the attack was widely viewed as the result of the shooter’s mental illness.
Palin’s original defamation claim was dismissed, but in 2019, the Second Circuit vacated the dismissal. The case goes to trial in 2022. Judge Jed Rakoff granted the Times’ motion for a directed verdict days before a jury found the newspaper not liable for defamation of Palin.
In its opinion, the appeals court agreed with Palin that Rakoff “erroneously disregarded or discredited her evidence of a real crime and improperly substituted his own decision for that of the jury.”
The New York Times told ABC News in a statement Wednesday: “This decision is disappointing. We are confident we will prevail in a retrial.”
Rakoff said he would set aside the verdict and dismiss the lawsuit because Palin had not met the high standard of showing the Times had acted with “actual malice” when it published an editorial that falsely linked Palin’s political action committee to the mob. shooting.
Palin sued the Times in 2017, about nine years after she was selected as GOP vice presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, claiming the newspaper deliberately damaged his burgeoning career as a political commentator and consultant by publishing a false editorial, he says harmed him.
The editorial requested by the lawsuit was published the same day a gunman opened fire on GOP politicians practicing for a congressional charity baseball game in Washington, DC, suburbs, injuring six, including Republican Rep. Steve Scalise.
Republican candidate for the US House of Representatives Sarah Palin attends a campaign event before the midterm elections in Anchorage, Alaska, October 9, 2022.
Kerry Tasker/Reuters, FILE
The editorial board of The Times wrote that before the mass shooting in Arizona in 2011 that killed six people and left Giffords with a traumatic brain injury, Palin’s political action committee had caused a violent atmosphere by distributing a map showing the electoral district of Giffords and 19 others. Democrats in stylized crosshairs.
Two days later, the Times published a correction saying that editors “misrepresented” the map and “falsely implied that there was a connection between the political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting.”
During the trial, Palin, in her testimony, accused the Times of deliberately fabricating information to damage her reputation.
Bennet testified that he was responsible for the incorrect information in the editorial, that it was an honest mistake and that he had nothing to do with it.
