The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Palin could try again to prove that the Times should be held liable for a 2017 editorial that falsely linked her to a mass murder six years earlier that left six people dead and Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seriously injured.
Media critics and Palin herself see the case as an opportunity to overturn the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling, New York Times vs. Sullivan. The ruling set a very high bar for proving defamation by public figures.
The appeals court said Rakoff improperly excluded evidence that Palin said reflected the Times’ “actual malice” in publishing the editorial, and that she misinformed the jury about how much evidence was needed to hold the Times liable.
It further said the verdict was likely tainted after jurors learned during deliberations from news reports on their cell phones that Rakoff would dismiss the case because Palin had not presented clear and convincing evidence of willful intent.
“The jury is sacrosanct in our legal system, and we have a duty to protect its constitutional role by, on the one hand, ensuring that the role of the jury is not usurped by judges, and, on the other, ensuring that juries are provided with the relevant evidence and are adequately instructed on the law,” Walker wrote.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for the Times, said: “This decision is disappointing. We are confident that we will succeed in a retrial.”
There was no immediate comment from Palin’s lawyer.
The Sullivan ruling requires public figures who believe they have been defamed to prove that the media showed “actual malice,” that is, that they knowingly published false information or recklessly disregarded the truth.
“America’s deadly politics”
The Times editorial, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” addressed gun control and lamented the rise of inflammatory political rhetoric.
It was released on June 14, 2017, after a gunman opened fire at a congressional baseball team practice in Alexandria, Virginia, wounding Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Scalise and others.
The editorial pointed out that Palin’s political action committee had published a map with crosshairs over Giffords’ district before the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which Giffords was injured.
Palin objected that the editorial’s original language, which said “the connection to political incitement was clear,” was clear, even though there was no evidence that the map was the motive for Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner.
Bennet had added the controversial sentence.
The Times corrected the editorial the next morning and removed the sentence after readers and a columnist complained.
Lawyers for the newspaper said neither the Times nor Bennet intended to link Palin to the Arizona shooting.
Palin, 60, was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008 and governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009.
She put the case in biblical terms, saying she considered herself an underdog compared to the Times’ Goliath.
The jury deliberated Palin’s case for about two days, including several hours after they heard news of Rakoff’s planned firing.
After the verdict was announced, they stated that the “push notifications” had no influence on their deliberations.
The case is Palin v. New York Times et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-558.
Sign up Here.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Hugh Lawson
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
