Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former governor of Alaska, appeared in federal court in Manhattan, New York City, on February 14, 2022, in a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.
Eduardo Muñoz | Reuters
A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned, for the second time, the dismissal of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and ordered the case to be retried.
Palin, who was the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008, claims she was defamed by a 2017 Times editorial that suggested the 2011 shooting death of then-Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords was linked to digital images released the previous year by Palin’s political action committee.
In 2019, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Palin’s lawsuit after Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed it, ruling that she had not sufficiently alleges “actual malice” in her complaint.
The appeals court said Wednesday that Judge Rakoff again erred when he ruled in The Times’s favor and dismissed the case during jury deliberations in the February 2022 case, finding that no reasonable juror could have found that The Times held actual malice toward Palin.
Rakoff told his lawyers he would only drop the lawsuit after the jury returned a verdict, which later found the Times “not liable” for the allegations.
In its decision Wednesday, the appeals court told a three-judge panel that Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case “improperly usurped the jury’s authority by making a credibility determination.”
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In its decision, the appeals panel also cited “several significant problems with the trial,” including “erroneous exclusion of evidence, inaccurate jury instructions,” Rakoff’s “legally incorrect answers” to juror questions and “the fact that jurors learned during deliberations that Rakoff had dismissed the charges.”
“Juries are sacred in our legal system and we have a duty to protect their constitutional role by ensuring that their role is not usurped by the judge and that jurors are provided with proper evidence and properly instructed on the law,” the appeals panel said.
“We therefore comply with this opinion and vacate and remand for proceedings, including a new trial.”
“We are disappointed with this decision,” Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement.
“We are confident that we will prevail on retrial,” Stadtlander added.
“Governor Palin is very pleased with today’s ruling, which marks a major step forward in the process of holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the public,” Shane Vogt, Palin’s attorney on appeal, said in a statement.
“The truth deserves a level playing field, and Governor Palin looks forward to presenting her case to a jury that will have been ‘presented with the relevant evidence and properly instructed as to the law,’ as stated in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision,” Vogt said.
