You bet’cha!
Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin may get the go-ahead to continue with her lawsuit against the New York Times.
An appeals panel hearing oral arguments in the case Friday hinted that they may revive Palin’s suit over an error in a Times’ editorial on gun control.
The three 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals judges said the procedure a lower court used to toss Palin’s defamation suit was unusual and a breach of normal protocol.
“This is such an unusual proceeding,” Judge John Walker said Friday. “It seems to me we’ve ventured into the territory of a trial.”
In August, Judge Jed Rakoff had dismissed the case after a hearing in which The Times’ editorial page editor, James Bennet, testified about writing the piece that linked Palin’s political rhetoric to to the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tuscon, Ariz.
Palin’s attorney, Elizabeth Locke, argued during the hearing that Rakoff’s unorthodox procedure robbed the former candidate for vice president of a chance to more thoroughly attack Bennet’s credibility.
Times attorney Lee Levine insisted that the paper hadn’t asked for Rakoff to handle the case the way he did. Palin’s allegation that the error in the article was the result of a long-simmering personal beef between her and Bennet was too ridiculous to be believed anyway, he added.
The editorial, which was quickly corrected, initially charged that Palin’s PAC put “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.” The crosshairs referred to electoral districts, not the pols themselves.
The appeals panel gave no indication Friday of when they’ll issue a decision on Palin’s case.
