Several jurors tasked with deciding Sarah Palin’s defamation case against the New York Times knew that the judge presiding over the trial had already ruled in the newspaper’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.

The jurors were still in the midst of deliberating Monday when U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said he would throw out the lawsuit, citing a lack of evidence proving the Times had knowingly or recklessly published falsehoods about her when it ran a 2017 opinion piece linking her to a deadly shooting. He said he would allow the jury to reach a verdict separately, but would dismiss the case afterward regardless of its decision.

But several of the jurors, who reached a verdict in favor of the Times the next day, told the judge’s clerk after ending deliberations that they weren’t able to avoid learning about Rakoff’s widely-reported decision when they went home the night before, the people said. Some cited learning about the decision through push notifications on their phone, the people said.

“I’m disappointed that the jurors even got these messages, if they did,” Rakoff said in an interview Wednesday, referring to the news notifications received by jurors. “I continue to think it was the right way to handle things.”

The judge said he spoke to his clerk Wednesday after being informed of the issue by Bloomberg, and was told that “at most three” jurors reported knowing about his ruling before delivering their verdict and all said it didn’t affect their deliberations.

On Monday, Rakoff told the parties in court of his plan to announce his ruling and allow deliberations to continue and neither side objected.

Upon making his ruling, Rakoff said Palin failed to show that the Times’s former opinion page editor James Bennet “either knew that the challenged statements were false, or that there was a high probability they were false and he recklessly disregarded that possibility.” That’s the so-called “actual malice” standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court for public figures like Palin in its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.

The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate sued the Times and Bennet over a piece entitled “America’s Lethal Politics” published in June 2017. Bennet inserted language into the piece suggesting a map published by Palin’s political action committee helped incite a 2011 shooting in Tuscon, Arizona, in which six people were killed and 14 wounded, including then-U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. An investigation later determined the shooter, who was mentally ill, had anger at Giffords unrelated to the map.

The Times and Bennet argued that they made honest mistakes that they corrected less than a day after publication.

(c) 2022, Bloomberg · Bob Van Voris 

{Matzav.com}