A number of jurors in Sarah Palin’s libel trial against the New York Times saw news notifications about the judge’s decision to throw out the case while they were still deliberating, according to a new court filing.
Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in a letter filed in the case Wednesday that several of the panelists had told his court clerk that they had seen mobile-phone push notifications about his decision to dismiss Palin’s complaint.
“These jurors reported that although they had been assiduously adhering to the Court’s instruction to avoid media coverage of the trial, they had involuntarily received ‘push notifications’ on their smartphones that contained the bottomline of the ruling,” Rakoff wrote in the letter.
The jurors assured the clerk that viewing the notifications did not influence their deliberations.
On Tuesday, the jurors found the New York Times did not defame Palin in a 2017 editorial that asserted there was a link between a map circulated by her political action committee and a 2011 mass shooting that wounded US Rep. Gabby Giffords.
On Monday, while the jury was still deliberating, Rakoff ruled that Palin had not met the high threshold of proving that the Times, and former editorial page editor James Bennet, acted with actual malice when they published the piece.
Rakoff told lawyers for the Times and Palin that he would therefore toss the suit after the jury returned its verdict. He added that he would wait to do so after the verdict, so an appeals court could weigh both his ruling on the law and the jury’s consensus.
Palin sued the Times in 2017, claiming the editorial, headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” incorrectly asserted a link between the 2011 mass shooting and a map created by her PAC, which showed congressional districts under cross hairs that looked like a rifle’s sights.
The claim that the map and shooting were connected was debunked years prior to the editorial.
Lawyers for the Times argued at trial that the error was an honest mistake and corrected within hours of being published.
In his letter Wednesday, Rakoff asked lawyers to organize a phone conference if they want to address the development.
