Judge defends move to toss Palin's libel case against NYT

NEW YORK (AP) — The judge presiding over Sarah Palin's defamation case against The New York Times said he was unfamiliar with push notifications and didn't realize news of his decision to toss out the lawsuit would reach jurors deliberating simultaneously. Despite that, he wrote that it didn’t really matter.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said in a written decision released Tuesday that he was “frank to confess” that he was unfamiliar with the term “push notifications” and did not “fully appreciate the potential for jurors to be involuntarily informed” about his plans.

The one-time Republican vice-presidential candidate's libel lawsuit centered on the newspaper's 2017 editorial falsely linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting, which Palin asserted damaged her reputation and career.

Rakoff said in mid-February that he would dismiss the lawsuit because Palin had failed to show that The Times had acted out of malice, something required in libel lawsuits involving public figures. That decision came while the jury was still deliberating; jurors themselves rejected Palin's lawsuit the next day.

The Times acknowledged that their editorial was inaccurate, but said it quickly corrected the errors they called an “honest mistake” never meant to harm Palin.

Rakoff said he thought it was fair to all parties not to wait for the jury's verdict because he had already decided as a matter of law that the former Alaskan governor hadn’t proven her case. The jury could have been dismissed at that point, but Rakoff let them reach a verdict in the event an appeals court eventually concluded he was wrong and returned the case to the lower court for a jury trial, as it had already done once before.

“While this approach was a bit unusual, neither side objected to it in the...