Sarah Palin wins new trial in her defamation case against The New York Times over ‘major’ jury issues

A federal appeals court has granted Sarah Palin a new trial in her defamation case against The New York Times, following “major” issues involving the jury at her last trial, including push alerts to jurors that signalled the judge overseeing the case was ready to dismiss it.

In February 2022, a jury unanimously determined that the newspaper and then-editorial director James Bennet were not liable for defamation over a 2017 editorial about the rise in violent political rhetoric.

But while the jury was deliberating outside of the courtroom, and before their decision was announced, District Judge Jed Rakoff told the court that he would dismiss Palin’s complaint anyway, determining that no reasonable jury would find that the newspaper and editor acted with actual malice in publishing the article.

News of that announcement reportedly reached jurors through push alerts to their phones.

Despite the judge’s moves to dismiss the case and the jury’s verdict, ”several major issues at trial” — including how jurors learned about the cases’s dismissal — “impugn the reliability of that verdict,” a panel of appeals court judges in New York wrote on Wednesday, more than two years after the decision was delivered.

At the center of Palin’s lawsuit is an editorial from the newspaper written in the aftermath of a 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game that criticized volatile political rhetoric.

Palin was not the subject of the editorial, but a map from her political action committee — featuring crosshairs over Democratic-leaning congressional districts — was cited as an example, pointing to a 2011 shooting in Arizona that nearly killed then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

In the course of editing the story, Bennet added a sentence