The lawsuit half-term governor of Alaska and former republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin brought against the New York Times relating to an editorial it published will be heard by a jury after it was reinstated by a federal circuit court, Politico reports.
The case revolves around a 2017 editorial concerning the 2011 Tucson, Arizona mass shooting that killed six and wounded 15, including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
A Times editorial posted online said it was “clear” that an election map Palin had posted on her website, using gunsite crosshairs to identify contested Congressional districts, had played a role in the 2011 shooting. In fact, no such connection had been made, and the mistake was corrected before the editorial went to print and was corrected online before the morning.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff improperly dismissed the case based on testimony from the Times’ then-editorial page editor James Bennet admitted to the mistake, saying that he had forgotten about earlier articles that dismissed the connection.
“Here, Bennet’s contention that, notwithstanding the words he used, he did not mean to suggest a direct link between the Map of the shooting, may be ‘so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would have’ chosen the words he chose to convey the meaning he (allegedly) sought to convey,” the judge wrote, quoting an earlier case.