Judge in Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against New York Times says he will dismiss case

Rakoff’s ruling came while the jury is deliberating over a verdict — and Rakoff said he will allow the jury to continue deliberating and to reach a verdict, and will dismiss the case once it has done so.

Rakoff presented his findings in court on Monday with an eye toward an inevitable appeals process.

The judge in the closely-watched trial said Palin did not prove “actual malice,” which is the standard her legal team had to meet in her defamation case.

The jury of nine, five women and four men, began deliberating around 4p.m. on Friday after sitting through seven days of trial.

Palin sued the Times and its former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2017 after they published an editorial that erroneously linked a map that Palin’s political action committee had posted to a shooting in 2011 that killed six and injured former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The editorial in question was called “America’s Lethal Politics” and it was published on the day of the shooting at a baseball practice that injured Congressman Steve Scalise. It was meant to address heated political rhetoric ahead of the shooting, but it erroneously said that there was a “clear” link between a map that had crosshairs over congressional districts, including Giffords’, and the shooting that injured her. Bennet testified that he added language about there being a clear link and that once he realized his error, he worked to quickly issue a correction.

Palin testified she was “mortified” that the Times falsely accused her of inciting the murder of those six people, which included 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 the man who shot Giffords and others was incited by Palin, testifying “that is not the message we intended to send.”

This is a developing story. Check back for more…

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