Jury Seated in Retrial of Sarah Palin’s Libel Suit Against the New York Times, Amid Jokes From Error-Plagued Judge

A jury was selected Monday in the retrial of Sarah Palin’s libel suit against the New York Times with the judge – who’s still overseeing the case despite an appeals court finding that he made a major error that caused the original verdict to be thrown out – quipping that the adversaries were “complete unknowns I’m sure.”Opening statements in the long-running legal dispute are set for Tuesday morning in federal district court at Manhattan after the jury was seated in less than an hour.Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential nominee, was in court on Monday but didn’t answer questions on her way out of the courthouse.Judge Jed Rakoff, 81, is overseeing the retrial despite an appeals court tossing the verdict in the first trial that cleared the Times and pointing the finger at him for telling the jurors he planned to toss the claims no matter what verdict they came up with.“I look forward very much to the retrial,” Judge Rakoff reportedly said during a pre-trial phone conference with lawyers on Friday. “I love trials. If you want to do this a third or fourth time it would be fine with me, but perhaps that’s not what you have in mind.”He also commented that the appeals court “seems to think I got it wrong in a lot of ways.” Judge Rakoff said he went back and read the entire opinion, “painful though it was,” according to the Associated Press.Ms. Palin sued the Times over a June 2017 gun control editorial that falsely linked her previous rhetoric to the 2011 shooting in Arizona that killed six people and gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The lines in question in the editorial were written by the then-opinion editor, James Bennet, the brother of Democratic Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, who’s considered a presidential prospect for 2028. The Times acknowledged that the editorial was inaccurate, but claimed that it was an “honest mistake.” It published a correction below the editorial and has vigorously defended itself in the lawsuit.Ms. Palin, though, insists that the Times met the high standard for defamation of public figures — “actual malice” — under the Supreme Court precedent that governs defamation law — New York Times v. Sullivan. Actual malice implies that the newspaper was aware that what it was publishing was incorrect but published it regardless.Ms. Palin hopes to use the case eventually to force the Supreme Court to revisit Sullivan. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have indicated they could support limits to the malice standard or get rid of it.Judge Rakoff has yet to rule on a pretrial defense motion to block Palin’s lawyers from entering evidence about Mr. Bennet’s messy department from the Times.He was pressured to resign after the Times published an opinion piece by Senator Cotton – which caused an uproar among the Times’s liberal staff – entitled “Send in the Troops” about violent Black Lives Matter protesters. Mr. Bennet, according to the Times, acknowledged that he never read the op-ed piece before it was published.The judge said on Friday that such evidence does not have relevance to Ms. Palin’s case.“It’s after the fact, not even before,” the judge said. “I’m presently inclined to grant the motion.”The retrial, which is the third time the case has come before Judge Rakoff, is expected to last as long as two weeks.

Jury Seated in Retrial of Sarah Palin’s Libel Suit Against the New York Times, Amid Jokes From Error-Plagued Judge

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