Sarah Palin requests new trial after losing New York Times defamation case
Former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked a federal court on Monday for a new trial after losing her defamation case against the New York Times earlier this month, and requested that the judge overseeing the case be disqualified.
Palin’s attorneys said last week they would take those steps because several jurors received push notifications on their cellphones before deliberations were over, about US district judge Jed Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case regardless of their verdict.
The jury rejected the Republican former Alaska governor’s argument that the newspaper and former editorial page editor defamed her in a June 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting in 2011 where six people died and then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded. The article was corrected the next day.
Rakoff said jurors assured his clerk that the notifications did not affect their deliberations, which lasted about two days. He said at a 23 February hearing that he would issue a written opinion by 1 March explaining why he dismissed Palin’s case while jurors were deliberating.
A day before the 15 February verdict, Rakoff said he would dismiss the case because Palin had not demonstrated that the Times acted with “actual malice”.
Palin’s case is considered a test of a landmark 1964 US supreme court decision, New York Times vs Sullivan, that established an “actual malice” standard for public figures to prove defamation.
Palin, who remains a prominent conservative, was the late US Senator John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, which was won by the Democratic team of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and she served as Alaska’s governor from 2006 to 2009.
She said during the trial the Times editorial left her feeling “powerless” and “mortified,” but did not offer specific examples about how it hurt her reputation or caused her harm.
Rakoff told the jury about his planned dismissal only after they had finished deliberations.
“We reached the same bottom line, but on different grounds,” he told jurors. “You decided the facts. I decided the law.”