MANHATTAN (CN) — Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin won her bid for a new trial against the New York Times over an editorial that she maintains defamed her by linking her rhetoric to a deadly shooting in Tucson that severely wounded Democratic U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a 2022 trial dismissal clearing the newspaper of liability should be vacated, and sent the case back to Manhattan federal court. The decision gives Palin a third chance to prove that the Times and former opinion editor James Bennet should be held liable for linking her words to inciting the 2011 mass shooting in a 2017 editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics.”
“Unfortunately, several major issues at trial — specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal ruling — impugn the reliability of that verdict,” senior United States Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr. wrote in the panel’s 56-page opinion.
Walker, a George H. W. Bush appointee, was joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Reena Raggi, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Sullivan, a Donald Trump appointee.
Representatives for Palin called the reversal a “significant step forward in the process of holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the public in general.”
While Palin’s case was previously dismissed in the lower court on First Amendment grounds for not meeting the high standard of showing actual malice, the Second Circuit reversed and ruled that a “strong inference of actual malice” could be drawn from the evidence.
“After reviewing the record and making all reasonable inferences in Palin’s favor as the nonmoving party, we conclude that there exists sufficient evidence, detailed below, for a reasonable jury to find actual malice by clear and convincing evidence,” Walker wrote.
Palin sued the Times in 2017 after her name appeared in a June 14 article by the Times editorial board on the day gunfire broke out at a congressional baseball practice.
The editorial blamed overheated political rhetoric for inciting gun violence, focusing in particular on a map that a political action committee for Palin had released featuring the stylized crosshairs of a gun over several election districts controlled by Democrats.
Sometime after the map was disseminated, Giffords, who represented one of those districts, was shot in the head at a "Congress on Your Corner" event.
Though the Times called the link from the shooting to Palin "clear" and "direct," within 14 hours it had published a correction saying there was no such link. No evidence has ever been shown that the Tucson shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, saw the Palin PAC's map.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff initially dismissed Palin's case for failing to identify anyone at the New York Times who had acted with actual malice, but in 2019 the Second Circuit revived the onetime vice presidential candidate's lawsuit.
Palin’s redo in the lower court went to trial in early 2022, where she ultimately met defeat with the jury's verdict and with Rakoff's mid-deliberation dismissal one day earlier.
Seeking to vacate Rakoff’s dismissal on appeal, Palin argued that the Clinton-appointed judge wrongly excluded evidence of the Times' actual malice and wrongly instructed jurors to disregard some of that evidence.
In an appeals brief, Palin said that Rakoff’s opinion had wrongfully concluded there was a lack of malice. The judge, she argued, relied on the idea that Bennet otherwise “likely would have been defensive, avoided issuing a correction to the editorial, or tried to minimize the correction’s confession of error.”
The judge, Palin argued, ignored evidence demonstrating actual malice that would “flatly refute Bennet’s preconceived narrative,” like the fact that Bennet had conceded, “I didn’t think then and don’t think now the map caused Jared Loughner to act.”
A spokesperson for the New York Times called the appeals ruling "disappointing," and said in a statement Wednesday evening that the paper is "confident we will prevail in a retrial."
The Times argued that the editorial’s link to Palin was an unintentional error that the company acknowledged and swiftly corrected.
Palin is not seeking recovery of lost income but claims she is entitled to at least $75,000 in damages “for the cost of repairing her reputation and/or the cost of correcting the defamatory statement.”
Follow @jruss_jruss
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
-
What’s hot in theaters? Old movies — and some that aren’t so old August 28, 2024
