Judge sets new trial date in Sarah Palin's libel lawsuit against The New York Times

A federal judge in New York on Tuesday set a trial date for April 14 in the libel lawsuit that Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, brought against The New York Times.

The trial date was decided over the objections of both the plaintiff and defense, who asked for a date in July to give the two sides time to possibly reach a settlement out of court.

"This case should not require very much preparation since it's a retrial," Judge Jed Rakoff said during a conference Tuesday.

A lawyer for the newspaper, David Axelrod, raised the possibility the two sides could settle and asked for more time. The judge did not agree to push the case into the summer.

Ken Turkel, a lawyer for Palin, agreed the idea would be to try and mediate.

"We just wanted to take some of the pressure off," Turkel said.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this summer that Palin can again try to hold the paper liable for a 2017 editorial that wrongly suggested she incited the 2011 mass shooting that killed six people and wounded then-Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The federal appeals court said Rakoff made errors during the first trial that "impugn the reliability" of the jury's verdict finding the Times not liable.

"If you're seriously interested in settling you can settle in a matter of days," Rakoff said Tuesday. "If you want to be referred to a magistrate for discussions I can do that on 24 hours' notice."

Rakoff, in a brief order last week, said the new trial "under no circumstances will be later than February 2025, and, if the parties prefer, can be as early as mid-December 2024."

The appellate court said Rakoff erred when he excluded evidence about James Bennet, who oversaw the newspaper's editorial board. Palin argued the evidence could help her show the Times acted with actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet to prevail in a libel case.

The 2017 editorial, entitled "America's Lethal Politics," linked the 2011 shooting of Giffords to a digital graphic of a crosshairs over Democratic congressional districts published in March 2010 by Palin's political action committee. A relationship between the crosshairs map and the shooting was never established. Rather, at the time of the editorial, the attack was widely viewed as a result of the shooter's mental illness.

Palin's original defamation lawsuit was dismissed but, in 2019, the 2nd Circuit vacated the dismissal. The case went to trial in 2022, and Rakoff granted the Times' motion for a directed verdict days before the jury found the newspaper was not liable for defaming Palin.