The verdict came a day after the judge said he planned to dismiss the case, ruling that Ms. Palin’s legal team had failed to prove that the newspaper defamed her.
A jury rejected Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times on Tuesday, finding that there was insufficient evidence to prove the newspaper had defamed her in a 2017 editorial that erroneously linked her political rhetoric to a mass shooting. The jury’s verdict, which First Amendment advocates applauded as a victory for the longstanding legal precedent that considers an occasional journalistic mistake a necessary cost of discourse in a free society, was the second time this week that Ms. Palin’s case was dealt a significant setback. On Monday, the presiding judge in federal court in Lower Manhattan, Jed S. Rakoff, reached a similar finding as the jury. He said that he would dismiss the case if the jury found in her favor because she had not demonstrated The Times acted with the level of recklessness and ill intent required to meet the high constitutional burden for public figures who claim defamation. Ms. Palin is expected to appeal. The case set up a high-stakes test of First Amendment law and the extremely high legal bar that the Supreme Court has set for proving a defamation claim against journalists. Lawyers for Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, argued that the longstanding legal protections in place to shield journalists from liability for almost any error that wasn’t intentional are outdated and overly broad.
