In a surprise decision in Sarah Palin’s defamation case against The New York Times, a judge has tossed out the former Alaska governor’s lawsuit after deciding that no reasonable jury could determine that the newspaper and the editor at the centre of the trial acted with actual malice in publishing a 2017 editorial.
The ruling on 14 February came as a jury was in the middle of a second day of deliberations, following a week-long trial in which Ms Palin testified about an editorial that falsely linked her political action committee’s map, featuring crosshairs over Democratic-leaning congressional districts, to a 2011 shooting in Arizona that killed six people and injured then-US Rep Gabby Giffords.
