Judge in Sarah Palin case defends handling of New York Times trial

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A federal judge on Tuesday forcefully defended his handling of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against the New York Times including his decision to dismiss her case while jurors were still deliberating.

“Sarah Palin wholly failed to prove her case even to the minimum standard required by law,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said in the first sentence of his 68-page decision.

Rakoff’s decision came two weeks after a jury found the Times and its former editorial page editor James Bennet not liable to Palin, the 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate.

Palin, 58, had sued over a June 2017 editorial about gun control that incorrectly linked her to a 2011 mass shooting.

After 1-1/2 days of deliberations without a verdict, Rakoff told lawyers outside jurors’ presence that he would dismiss Palin’s case because she had not offered clear and convincing evidence that the Times acted with “actual malice.”

That timing proved problematic because some jurors received “push” notifications on their cellphones about Rakoff’s plan.

Some later told the judge’s clerk it had no effect on their deliberations, which lasted another few hours.

“The court knows of no reason why the highly conscientious citizens who served as jurors in this case would be so firm that they were unaffected by this information unless it were true,” wrote the judge, who has overseen more than 300 jury trials.

Rakoff said “no party objected in the slightest” to letting jurors keep deliberating after he ruled against Palin, and noted how he admonished jurors to “turn away” if they learned what he did.

“The more fundamental point,” he added, “is that any effect the push notifications may have had is legally irrelevant.”

Kenneth Turkel, a lawyer for Palin, declined to comment.

Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email: “We remain confident that the judge and jury decided the case fairly and correctly.”

Analysts view Palin’s case as a test of New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing the “actual malice” standard for public figures to prove defamation.

To win, public figures must show that news media knowingly published false information or had reckless disregard for the truth.

On Monday, Palin’s lawyers confirmed they would seek to throw out the verdict, get a new trial and disqualify Rakoff from the case.

Their legal arguments are due by March 15, with the Times scheduled to reply by March 29.

The June 14, 2017, Times editorial addressed gun control and lamented the rise of incendiary political rhetoric.

It followed a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia, where Republican U.S. congressman Steve Scalise was among the wounded.

One of Bennet’s colleagues had prepared a draft editorial that referred to the January 2011 shooting in Arizona that killed six and wounded Democratic U.S. congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Bennet inserted incorrect language that said “the link to political incitement was clear” between the Arizona shooting and a map from Palin’s political action committee putting Giffords and 19 other Democrats under crosshairs.

The Times corrected the editorial the next morning.

Palin was the late Senator John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, and was Alaska’s governor from 2006 to 2009.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Will Dunham and Jonathan Oatis)