Judges Rule In Favor Of Palin vs. NYTimes

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.

Courthouse News reports 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.

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.

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.

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.