A US jury on Tuesday ruled against former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times over a 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting, after the presiding judge said he would dismiss the case regardless of the verdict.
Jurors in Manhattan federal court needed about two days to unanimously find that the Times was not liable to Ms Palin, the 2008 Republican US vice presidential candidate.
Ms Palin was expected to appeal.
In announcing he would dismiss the lawsuit, US District Judge Jed Rakoff said on Monday the appeals court “would greatly benefit from knowing how the jury would decide it".
Mr Rakoff told the jury about his planned dismissal only after they had finished deliberations.
“We reached the same bottom line, but on different grounds,” he told jurors. “You decided the facts. I decided the law.”
The trial lasted nine days.
Ms Palin had sued the newspaper and its former editorial page editor James Bennet, arguing that a 2017 editorial incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting six years earlier that wounded Democratic US congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
It is rare for a major media outlet to defend its editorial practices in court, as the Times had to do in this case.
Ms Palin had said that if she lost at trial, her appeal might challenge New York Times v Sullivan, the 1964 US Supreme Court decision establishing the “actual malice” standard for public figures to prove defamation.
The lawsuit concerned a June 14, 2017, editorial headlined “America's Lethal Politics”, that addressed gun control and lamented the rise of incendiary political rhetoric.
It was written the same day as a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, where Republican US congressman Steve Scalise was wounded.
One of Mr Bennet's colleagues prepared a draft that referred to the January 2011 shooting in a Tucson, Arizona, car park where six people were killed and Ms Giffords was wounded.
Mr Bennet inserted language that said “the link to political incitement was clear” between the shooting and a map previously circulated by Ms Palin's political action committee that the draft editorial said put Ms Giffords and 19 other Democrats in the crosshairs.
Agencies contributed to this report
