The jury in the case of Sarah Palin v. The New York Times is in the hands of the jury. We will report as soon as a verdict is reached.
UPDATE 6 p.m. – Jury has broken for the day, no verdict, return 9:30 a.m. Monday
EARLIER:
Here’s the public listening line: (844) 721-7237, access code 7920433.
Here is the jury form.
The judge had not allowed the issue of punitive damages to get to the jury.
Here is a summary of closing arguments from Deadline:
During closing arguments, Palin’s attorney Kenneth Turkel argued that there was ample evidence that the Times had reckless disregard for the truth, one of the thresholds for winning a libel suit. He noted that Bennet, seeking to find an example of a Republican engaging in “political incitement,” wrote the line in the op-ed even after he ordered research that showed that the link was false. It also included a hyperlink to an ABC News story that said that no link was ever shown between the Palin PAC and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner.“What it is Mr. Bennet being so convinced that that theory is right that he tried to reverse engineer the facts on it,” Turkel said.The attorney for the Times, David Axelrod, told jurors that the op-ed was an “honest mistake” that was quickly corrected.“There was no conspiracy,” Axelrod said. “This was a mess up, a goof.”He pointed to a Times Twitter posting, alerting readers of the revised language, that read, “We screwed up.”“Why would they write, ‘We screwed up,’ if they intended to harm someone?” Axelrod said.The original Times editorial, headlined America’s Lethal Politics, read, “Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”The Times issued a correction and revised the editorial the day after it posted online. The Times also conceded that it had incorrectly characterized a map from Palin’s political action committee that featured crosshairs over certain Democrats’ electoral districts, including Giffords’.Axelrod argued that Palin had not shown that the Times knew what they were printing was false, one of the central thresholds for public figures like Palin to prevail in a libel case.He also argued that Palin’s reputation was not damaged, pointing to her ability to garner speaking engagements afterward, along with a spot on Fox’s The Masked Singer in 2020.“The Masked Singer. Do they put on inciters of violence?” Axelrod asked.“Yes, Governor Palin said that she was mortified. That doesn’t mean it was defamatory,” he said.Turkel noted that the Times ran a correction, but it did not include an apology or refer to Palin by name, while keeping the name of her political action committee in the revised op-ed.He also countered a Times‘ defense: That Bennet’s use of the word “incitement” was not meant to suggest that that the rhetoric Palin’s PAC had a direct link to Loughner’s attack. Bennet testified that he used the word more broadly, to point to the environment of harsh rhetoric, but Turkel noted that few people were reading it that way.Turkel said that the editorial was “indicative of an arrogance and sense of power that’s uncontrolled” at the Times, with disdain toward conservative figures like Palin, per the AP.“All they had to do was dislike her a little less, and we’re not sitting here today,” he said.
Politico adds:
Sarah Palin’s lawyer offered jurors a simple explanation Friday for why The New York Times used a 2017 editorial to link Palin to a deadly shooting in Arizona six years earlier: a long-standing political vendetta against conservatives.“They just didn’t care. She’s one of them,” attorney Ken Turkel said during closing arguments of the former Alaska governor’s libel suit against the Times….On several occasions during his summation of the evidence in a Manhattan courtroom, Turkel argued that the Times’ decision to reference Palin’s political action committee in the editorial spurred by a shooting at a GOP congressional baseball practice in Virginia was part of a pattern at the newspaper of slurring Republicans.“There’s common thread through all the pieces as to how they treat people on the right they don’t agree with,” Palin’s attorney said. “Look at the common thread: how in every single one of them they demonize the right wing or just treated them differently.” ….Palin’s lawyer said there was deep irony in the editorial in question, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” which argued that extreme political rhetoric can fuel real-world violence. He said the then-editor of the opinion section, James Bennet, and his colleagues were so intent on claiming such a link that they casually accused Palin of complicity in murder.“It’s absurd. In so many respects, they perpetuate everything they sit there and condemn,” Turkel said.
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