Jurors found Tuesday that The New York Times did not defame Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate, in a June 2017 editorial that wrongly claimed a link between an ad from her political action committee and a mass shooting many months later.
It was a one-two punch for Palin. The unanimous verdict came a day after the presiding judge, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, ruled that he would set aside the jury’s verdict – whatever it might be – and dismiss the case. He said Palin had failed to make a sufficient argument that the Times had acted with actual malice to let the case be determined by a jury.
That legal standard, set in a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that also involved the Times, requires that the newspaper either knowingly published damning and false information, or recklessly disregarded the likelihood that its claims were likely to prove false.
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