On Wednesday, a federal appeals court revived former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel Wednesday granted former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a new libel trial, faulting the trial judge for dismissing the case before the jury had reached a verdict. The jury was allowed to continue deliberating before ultimately finding the newspaper not liable in February 2022.
Senior United States Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr. wrote in the opinion: “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. We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case. No statement in this opinion should be understood as resolving issues of fact.”
Palin sued for defamation in 2017, claiming she was defamed in an editorial when her rhetoric was linked to the Tucson shooting attack that wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. According to the appeals court opinion, the editorial in question said the Giffords shooter’s “rage was nurtured in a vile political climate” and that the “pro-gun right [was] criticized” at the time. The editorial also noted that before the shooting Palin’s political action committee had “circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”
The libel case against the Times was first reinstated on August 2019, but the district court dismissed her case again under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. The New York Times said in a statement: “This decision is disappointing. We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.”
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