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NEW YORK, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked a U.S. court on Monday for a new trial after losing her defamation case against the New York Times (NYT.N) earlier this month, and requested that the judge overseeing the case be disqualified. Palin's attorneys said last week they would take those steps because several jurors received push notifications on their cellphones before deliberations were over about U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's decision to dismiss the case regardless of their verdict.

NEW YORK, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate, plans to seek a new trial and have the judge disqualified after losing her defamation case against the New York Times. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan discussed Palin's plan at a hearing on Wednesday, and said he will issue a written opinion by March 1 explaining why he dismissed her case while jurors were deliberating. He said he would speed up the opinion because of the "fracas" surrounding the dismissal. The unusual hearing came eight days after jurors rejected...

Legal experts have slammed the Clinton-appointed New York judge who tossed Sarah Palin's libel lawsuit against The New York Times while jurors are still deliberating the case and say he's effectively hobbled the jury. 'I would have expected the judge to wait for the jury to return its verdict before ruling on the motion for judgment as a matter of law, because there was no urgency to issuing that ruling,' attorney Mitchell Epner, of Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, told Law & Crime on Monday. 'Nothing would have changed if he had waited for the verdict to have been announced, or...

A federal judge said on Monday that he will dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times, concluding that Palin’s lawyers had failed to show the publication acted with actual malice.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tested positive for COVID-19, which may delay her civil suit against the New York Times that was scheduled to go to trial Monday, one of her attorneys said. Palin is scheduled to take another test Monday morning and if that yields a negative result, her trial could resume with jury selection later in the day. If she tests positive again, however, Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff will delay the trial until Feb. 3, attorney Shane Vogt said. “She is, of course, unvaccinated,” Rakoff said in court Monday morning while discussing the logistics.

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has tested positive for Covid, and is unvaccinated, a federal judge told a courtroom Monday just as a civil defamation trial involving the one-time-Alaska governor and the New York Times was set to begin. Palin, who disclosed in March that she had been diagnosed then with the coronavirus, said last month that she will get a Covid-19 vaccine “over my dead body.”

The trial will begin this week in former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) defamation case against The New York Times over a corrected editorial linking her to "political incitement." Palin’s case is set to be heard in a Manhattan federal court beginning Monday, where the former vice presidential candidate will try and convince jurors that the newspaper and its former editorial page editor James Bennet defamed her in an opinion piece, according to Reuters.

The New York Times doesn’t often defend its journalistic practices before a jury. But later this month, the “Gray Lady” will indeed do so as the influential newspaper has a trial date with Sarah Palin. Very much under the radar, jury selection in the four-year-old case begins on Jan. 24. The former vice presidential candidate alleges being defamed by a 2017 editorial linking one of her political action committee ads to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded then-Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. James Bennet, the author of the editorial, picked up on the use of crosshairs in the advertisement and...

Sarah Palin wants jurors to be barred from seeing footage of her appearance on “The Masked Singer” in her defamation case against the New York Times that may go to trial in the coming weeks.

one might suspect that Kenneth Polite, the man President Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in July, might also take an interest in this matter since the plaintiff is alleging that the Justice Department got played by JPMorgan Chase in its 2016 non-prosecution agreement. Unfortunately, Polite will have to recuse himself from this matter because JPMorgan Chase was his client at his former law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, according to the financial disclosure form he filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Polite signed an Ethics Agreement on April 23,...

In Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo, (2d Cir., Nov. 9, 2020), the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision refused to grant an injunction pending appeal to a group of Jewish synagogues and to the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn in a case challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's restrictions on spots in which clusters of COVD-19 cases have broken out. (See prior posting.) The majority said in part: The Court fully understands the impact the executive order has had on houses of worship throughout the affected zones. Nevertheless, the Appellants cannot clear the high bar necessary...

A New York judge ruled on Friday that a letter sent by Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to the Yankees addressing the findings of a 2017 investigation into the team should be unsealed. MLB and the Yankees may submit a minimally redacted version of the letter “to protect the identity of the individuals mentioned” by noon ET on Monday, as part of the proceedings in a lawsuit brought against the league by daily fantasy sports contestants in the wake of the sign-stealing scandals in Houston and Boston. The Yankees argue the letter would cause “significant reputational injury,” Judge Jed...

Judge Finds Federal Executions Unconstitutional Mon Jul 1, 6:29 PM ET By Gail Appleson, Law Correspondent NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. trial judge on Monday declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional, calling it tantamount to "state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings." The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff was the first by a federal trial judge to find the current federal death penalty law unconstitutional. It comes at a time of growing national debate about capital punishment, sparked partly by recent exonerations of death-row inmates because of DNA evidence. Although it was unclear whether the decision would be...