Rakoff’s verdict came while the jury was deliberating on a verdict — and Rakoff said he will allow the jury to continue deliberating and reach a verdict, and will dismiss the case once it has done so.
Rakoff presented his findings in court on Monday with a view to an inevitable appeals process.
The judge in the close trial said Palin showed no “real malice,” which is the standard her legal team had to meet in her defamation case.
“I think this is an example of very unfortunate editing on the part of the Times,” Rakoff said in his court ruling on Monday. “The law here sets a very high standard (for actual malice). The court is of the opinion that that standard has not been met.”
Rakoff ruled that the jury will continue to deliberate on whether the Times is liable for defaming Palin. If the jury comes back with a verdict finding that the Times was not liable, the judge said he will enforce the jury’s verdict. If the jury finds the Times liable, Rakoff is expected to set his verdict aside and replace it with a legal verdict in favor of DailyExpertNews.
Rakoff said he was “not entirely happy with having to make this decision in favor of the defendants.”
Lawyers for the DailyExpertNews hugged after the decision was made in court. Palin’s lawyers did not comment on DailyExpertNews’s question.
Rakoff said earlier on Monday that regardless of the jury’s decision, “this is the kind of case that will inevitably go to appeal.”
The jury of nine, five women and four men, deliberated for more than nine hours. Rakoff has released the jury for today; Deliberations are expected to resume on Tuesday at 9:30 am.
“I love this jury and wish you a happy Valentine’s Day,” Rakoff said when he told the jury to “turn away” when faced with media reports of the trial.
the lawsuit
Palin sued the Times and former editor of the editorial page James Bennet in 2017 after they published an editorial falsely linking a map posted by Palin’s political action committee to a 2011 shooting that left six and injured former Congresswoman Gabrielle. Giffords perished.
The editorial in question was called “America’s Lethal Politics” and was published the day of the baseball practice shooting that injured Congressman Steve Scalise. It was intended to address heated political rhetoric ahead of the shooting, but it erroneously said there was a “clear” link between a cross-haired map of congressional districts, including Giffords’s, and the shooting that injured her. Bennet testified that he added language about the existence of an obvious connection and that once he realized his mistake, he worked to quickly issue a correction.
Palin testified that she was “mortified” that the Times falsely accused her of inciting the murder of those six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, six years after that deadly shooting.
Bennet testified that he was surprised that some people interpreted the editorial as saying that the man who shot Giffords and others had been incited by Palin, testifying that “that’s not the message we wanted to send.”