A federal appeals court has revived Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times , finding fault with the way that a trial court judge announced that he planned to dismiss the case as a jury was deliberating.
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“The jury is sacrosanct in our legal system, and we have a duty to protect its constitutional role, both by ensuring that the jury’s role is not usurped by judges and by making certain that juries are provided with relevant proffered evidence and properly instructed on the law,” a Circuit Court Judge John L. Walker wrote in an opinion on behalf of a three-judge panel ( read it here ).
The case is now remanded to a lower court for a new trial.
Palin sued the Times and its then-opinion editor James Bennet over a 2017 editorial.
The June 14, 2017 Times piece, written hours after a shooter opened fire on a congressional softball game, delved into harsh political rhetoric and its links to violence. Bennet said he was responsible for inserting an edit into the story that linked Palin’s political action committee to a 2011 mass shooting, in which six people were killed and Rep. Gabby Giffords was severely wounded.
In fact, no link was established between the PAC and the mass shooting, and the Times corrected the piece. But Palin still sued.
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As the jury was deliberating in February, 2022, the judge, Jed Rakoff, had told attorneys that he would toss out the case, concluding that Palin had not met “a very high standard for actual malice.” The jury continued to deliberate and ultimately reached a unanimous verdict that the Times and Bennet were not liable.
But Walker noted that some jurors reported receiving “push” notifications on their smartphones about Rakoff’s decision.
“Given a judge’s special position of influence with a jury, we think a jury’s verdict reached with the knowledge of the judge’s already-announced disposition of the case will rarely be untainted, no matter what the jurors say upon subsequent inquiry,” Walker wrote. “We therefore conclude that a new trial is warranted on this basis.”
Walker also faulted other aspects of the trial, including “erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, [and] a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question.”
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