A federal judge said on Monday that he will dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times, concluding that Palin’s lawyers had failed to meet a very high burden of showing actual malice.
“I think this is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times,” said U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff. “Having said that that is not the issue before the court. The law sets a very high standard for actual malice.”
A jury started deliberating on Friday, but Rakoff said that he was ruling on Times’ attorneys motions to dismiss. The judge said that he would not file his ruling until the jury reaches its verdict.
The editorial, written hours after a shooter opened fire on a congressional softball game, originally linked the “incitement” rhetoric of Palin’s political action committee to a 2011 mass shooting in which six people were killed and congresswoman Gabby Giffords was severely wounded. In fact, no link was established, and The Times issued corrections, but Palin sued, claiming that the editor who inserted the disputed sentences, James Bennet, showed either malice or reckless disregard when he inserted the disputed sentences into the editorial.
The original Times editorial, headlined America’s Lethal Politics, read, “Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”