Several jurors in Sarah Palin’s defamation case against the New York Times learned before they issued a verdict that the judge planned to reject the former Republican vice-presidential nominee’s claims, though they said it didn’t affect deliberations, according to a court document.
A federal jury in Manhattan found for the Times on Tuesday, determining Ms. Palin didn’t prove her claim that she was libeled by a 2017 editorial about political rhetoric and gun violence.
The verdict came a day after U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said he intended to throw out Ms. Palin’s claims no matter how the jury verdict came out. The judge concluded that Ms. Palin failed to establish a central element of a defamation claim, namely that the editorial was published with “actual malice” by the Times. She fell short of that standard, the judge said, because she couldn’t show the Times either knowingly published a false statement or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth.
Judge Rakoff made his announcement outside of the jury and said he would let deliberations conclude because a verdict would benefit an appeals court if it reviews the case—and potentially help avoid the need for a retrial if his decision were overturned.
Members of the jury were instructed several times to avoid any media coverage of the trial, but the judge in an order Wednesday said some jurors “had involuntarily received ‘push notifications’ on their smartphones that contained the bottom-line of the ruling.”
“The jurors repeatedly assured the Court’s law clerk that these notifications had not affected them in any way or played any role whatever in their deliberations,” the judge wrote.
The order brought new attention to the unusual timing of Judge Rakoff’s ruling announcement Monday. Legal observers said judges do sometimes override a jury verdict based on controlling law, but typically such a ruling would come before jurors begin deliberating or after their work is done.
“[Rakoff] acts in a very clever and efficient way, but sometimes not in strict accord with the procedural rules, and that can be troublesome,” said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former attorney for the Times. Now, Ms. Palin could have an opening to attack the jury verdict as being tainted by the judge’s ruling announcement, he said.
Lawyers for Ms. Palin didn’t respond to requests for comment. After the jury verdict, they said they were considering their legal options.
A Times spokeswoman declined to comment on the judge’s order.
Judge Rakoff in Wednesday’s order said neither side had objected to his plan Monday to announce his ruling while the jury was deliberating.
The case focused on a 2017 editorial in which the Times incorrectly suggested that an ad circulated by Ms. Palin’s political-action committee inspired a 2011 shooting spree.
The Times said its mistake was an honest one, corrected quickly, and shouldn’t subject it to legal liability. Ms. Palin argued the Times’s actions were insufficient and accused the paper of an anti-Republican agenda.
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