Judge orders jury trial in Sarah Palin libel suit against New York Times

The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was mentally ill and was sentenced to life in prison in 2012.The Times corrected that language the morning after the editorial was first published online, but Palin sued, claiming that then-editorial page editor James Bennet knew or should have known the claim was false because when he served as editor of the Atlantic magazine it published numerous articles indicating that no link between the crosshairs map and the shooting had been established.Rakoff threw out the case in 2017 after an unusual early hearing he ordered in which Bennet testified that he was responsible for the error and simply forgot about the earlier articles.But a federal appeals court revived the suit last year, ruling that the unorthodox procedure Rakoff used violated Palin’s rights under federal court rules to pursue evidence and testimony about the episode before a definitive ruling on her suit.As that process has gone forward, Rakoff said it was possible that jurors might conclude the error was intentional or the product of what he termed “a purposeful avoidance of the truth.”“Taking the evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff, she has sufficiently pointed to enough issues of triable fact that would enable a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence that Bennet knew, or was reckless not to know, that his words would convey the meaning in the minds of the readers that plaintiff asserts was libelous, to wit, that she bore a direct responsibility for inciting the Loughner shooting,” wrote the judge, a Clinton appointee.Despite his earlier ruling in the Times’ favor, Rakoff expressed some skepticism about Bennet’s claim that he was not attempting to draw a direct causal link between the Palin group’s graphic and the Tucson shooting.“Here, Bennet’s contention that, notwithstanding the words he used, he did not mean to suggest a direct link between the Map of the shooting, may be ‘so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would have’ chosen the words he chose to convey the meaning he (allegedly) sought to convey,” the judge wrote, quoting an earlier case.Rakoff also said the Times’ self-styled “correction” could be viewed as undercutting its current contention that the initial statement was simply ambiguous and not wrong.The judge did find for Bennet on some points, noting that the evidence established he had no role in Atlantic articles about the Loughner shooting.“We’re disappointed in the ruling but are confident we will prevail at trial when a jury hears the facts,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades-Ha said.