A federal appeals court has reinstated Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against The New York Times, taking issue with the way a trial court judge announced his intention to dismiss the case during jury deliberations.
“The jury is sacrosanct in our legal system, and we have a duty to protect its constitutional role by ensuring, on the one hand, that the role of the jury is not usurped by judges and, on the other, that juries are provided with the relevant evidence and are adequately instructed on the law,” District Court Judge John L. Walker wrote in an opinion on behalf of a three-judge panel.
The case will now be remanded to a lower court for a retrial.
Palin sued the Times and its then-opinion editor James Bennet over a 2017 editorial.
June 14, 2017 Just The article, written hours after a gunman opened fire at a congressional softball game, addressed sharp political rhetoric and its connection to violence. Bennet said he was responsible for inserting an amendment to the article that linked Palin’s political action committee to a 2011 mass shooting that killed six people and seriously injured Rep. Gabby Giffords.
In fact, no connection could be established between the PAC and the shooting, and the Times corrected the article. Palin filed suit nonetheless.
During jury deliberations in February 2022, Judge Jed Rakoff told attorneys he would dismiss the case because Palin had failed to meet “a very high standard of actual malice.” The jury continued deliberating and eventually reached a unanimous verdict that the Times and Bennet were not liable.
However, Walker noted that some jurors reported receiving push notifications about Rakoff’s decision on their smartphones.
“Given the judge’s special position of influence over a jury, we believe that a jury’s verdict, rendered in the knowledge of the judge’s decision on the case already announced, will rarely be unaffected by what the jurors say during subsequent questioning,” Walker wrote. “We therefore conclude that on this basis a new trial is warranted.”
Walker also criticized other aspects of the trial, including “the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate instruction to the jury (and) a legally incorrect answer to a jury question during deliberation.”
