A New York judge on Tuesday said he dismissed former Alaska governor and Republican vice president candidate Sarah Palin as she failed to prove that The New York Times acted with actual malice when it published an 2017 editorial linking rhetoric she used to a deadly 2011 shooting that left then Arizona lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords injured. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI |
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March 1 (UPI) -- The judge who presided over Sarah Palin's defamation trial against The New York Times concerning a 2017 editorial said in a written opinion Tuesday that he dismissed the case last month because she "wholly failed" to prove her argument.
The opinion comes in a case brought before the court by the former Alaskan governor who accused The New York Times and its editor James Bennet of defaming her with an editorial that stated there was a link between her political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting spree that killed six people and injured then-Arizona Democratic lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords.
The New York Times would issue two corrections to the piece after its publication stating that no such link had been established. Not long after that, Palin sued the paper.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff for the Southern District of New York dismissed the former Alaskan governor's case against The New York Times, stating her lawyers did not meet the legal threshold required to prove defamation amid jury deliberations.
Palin then filed a motion seeking a new trial after a few jurors said they had learned of the judge's decision amid deliberations via push notifications on their smart phones.
After the case was dismissed, the jury returned its "not liable" verdict.
In his Tuesday opinion obtained by Law & Crime explaining his decision to dismiss the case, Rakoff said not only did Pailin "wholly failed to prove her case" but that "no reasonable jury" would be able to find that The New York Times or Bennet knew at the time of publication that the allegedly libelous statements were false or that they were probably false and were recklessly published anyway.
He continued neither attorneys of the plaintiffs nor defense disagreed with his plan to allow the jury to continue its deliberating so that if the court of appeals were to disagree with his determination it would not have to send the case back for trial as it would have the jury's verdict.
"The parties were given four opportunities to object to the procedure ... and never did so," he wrote in the opinion.
Rakoff wrote that the verdict validated his decision as "no reasonable juror could find by clear and convincing evidence that Bennet or the Times had acted with malice."
He continued that despite a few jurors learning of his decision to dismiss the case none said that knowledge affected their ruling "in the slightest."
To win her case, Palin had to prove with clear and convincing evidence that the newspaper or Bennet had intended to inflict "actual malice" by publishing the editorial, as required by the First Amendment of the Constitution and by New York State statutory law, but she failed to do so.
"The Court finds that Palin adduced no affirmative evidence that Bennet knew that the Challenged Statements were false or recklessly disregarded their probable falsity," Rakoff wrote Tuesday.
