April 15 (UPI) — Another jury is hearing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times after a second federal trial got underway on Tuesday.
The Times in 2022 initially prevailed in Palin’s lawsuit accusing the newspaper of defaming her in an editorial following a 2017 mass shooting.
Palin, 61, successfully appealed the 2022 verdict and won a retrial order from the federal 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appellate court ruled the trial judge erred by allowing jurors to have access to their smartphones while deliberating the case and a push notification said the trial judge was prepared to dismiss the case in favor of the Times.
U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff presided over the 2022 trial and is presiding over the retrial, but he prohibited jurors from accessing their phones, smartwatches and other mobile devices while the trial is underway.
Opening arguments in the retail began Tuesday in the Manhattan courthouse for the U.S. District Court for Southern New York.
Editorial error raises First Amendment challenge
Attorney Felicia Ellsworth told the court the Times made an error that was visible on the newspaper’s website for 14 hours before revising it.
Ellsworth said the Times’ editors did a bad job of describing a graphic that appeared in Palin’s campaign materials and called the matter a First Amendment case in which the newspaper is protected against such errors.
“The moment they realized they made a mistake, they did exactly what they should have done and they fixed it,” Ellsworth told the court.
“She wants this case to be about how unfairly the media has treated her,” Ellsworth said. “She needs to show that they actually knew that they were saying something false but said it anyway.”
Attorney Shane Vogt represented Palin during the first trial and is representing her during the retrial.
He said the Times never apologized to Palin and did not include her name when it corrected the editorial error.
A 1964 Supreme Court ruling in the New York Times vs. Sullivan determined news media are protected against defamation lawsuits when they make errors without “actual malice.”
Unless done intentionally, media are not accountable for published errors, especially if they correct them after learning of the errors, the court ruled.
2017 ‘Lethal Politics’ editorial
A Times editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics” and published on June 14, 2017, appeared to blame Palin, 61, for inspiring a 2011 shooting by Jared Loughner, who seriously wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz.
The editorial compared Giffords’ shooting with the 2017 attack on the House Republicans’ charity baseball team as an example of political violence in the United States.
James Hodgkinson of Illinois was 66 when he shot former Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and four others while practicing for a charity baseball game at Eugene Simpson Park in Alexandria, Va., on June 14, 2017.
Responding officers shot and killed Hodgkinson, who the Secret Service said referred to President Donald Trump as a “traitor” and a threat to democracy and was “intensely upset and angry” about the results of the 2016 election, according to the Secret Service.
Hodgkinson was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and volunteered for Sanders while he sought the Democratic Party nomination for president in Illinois in 2016.
