Aug. 28 (UPI) — A Second Court of Appeals three-judge panel Wednesday granted former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a new libel trial against the New York Times.
Palin claims she was defamed in an editorial when her rhetoric was linked to the Tucson shooting attack that wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
“Unfortunately, several major issues at trial — specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal ruling — impugn the reliability of that verdict,” senior United States Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr. wrote in the opinion.
The New York Times said in a statement to ABC News, “This decision is disappointing. We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.”
Palin’s libel case against the NY Times was first reinstated on August 2019, but the district court dismissed her case again under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50.
“We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case,” the appeals court ruling said.
The ruling added, “No statement in this opinion should be understood as resolving issues of fact.”
All three judges on the appeals court panel were appointed by Republican U.S. presidents — two are George W. Bush appointees, and one is a Trump appointee.
The editorial in question, according to the appeals court opinion, said the Giffords shooter’s “rage was nurtured in a vile political climate” and that the “pro-gun right [was] criticized” at the time.
The editorial also noted, according to the court, that before the shooting Palin’s political action committee had “circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”
Times columnist Ross Douthat, raised concerns about the editorial less than an hour after it was published online.
He wrote that there was no evidence that the shooter “was incited by Sarah Palin or anyone else, given his extreme mental illness and lack of any tangible connection” to the cross-hairs map.
The Times revised the editorial with two corrections.
One said the original editorial had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.”
The second correction the next day said that the crosshairs map from a Palin political action committee depicted the congressional districts, not photos of the representatives themselves.
The editorial that prompted her lawsuit was published June 14, 2017, the same day that a shooter opened fire on GOP members of Congress playing a congressional charity baseball game in Washington, D.C.
Palin sued for defamation in 2017.
