A Manhattan-based appeals court on Tuesday revived Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against The New York Times over a since-corrected editorial that said her political action committee was partly to blame in a 2011 mass shooting that left former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Arizona, seriously injured.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a 2017 decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York to dismiss Palin’s suit over a Times editorial linking rhetoric used by her PAC—which included the use of crosshairs to target congressional districts to flip from Democratic to Republican—to the act of gun violence. Rakoff had reasoned that Palin could make no showing of actual malice on the part of the Times.

Now, a Second Circuit panel has ruled that Palin should have a chance to prove the actual malice element. They revived the case on procedural grounds, holding that the trial court’s ruling “runs headlong” into federal rules because it incorrectly looked to evidence outside the complaint, specifically when the court conducted a hearing with the editorial’s author.

“It is clear to us that the district court viewed the hearing as a way to more expeditiously decide whether Palin had a viable way to establish actual malice,” Senior Judge John M. Walker wrote in a 21-page opinion.

“But, despite the flexibility that is accorded district courts to streamline proceedings and manage their calendars, district courts are not free to bypass rules of procedure that are carefully calibrated to ensure fair process to both sides,” he said.

Walker was joined in his decision by Judge Denny Chin and, sitting by designation, Senior Judge John Keenan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Walker and Keenan were appointed to the judiciary by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan respectively, while Chin is an appointee of President Barack Obama.

The court took no position on the merits of Palin’s claim but said the case should move ahead to full discovery. 

Palin’s lawyers, Elizabeth Locke and Kenneth Turkel, said the case “is—and always has been—about media accountability.”

“We are pleased with the court’s decision, and we look forward to starting discovery and ultimately proceeding to trial,” they said.

The Times said it would mount a “vigorous” defense of the action.

“We are disappointed in the decision and intend to continue to defend the action vigorously,” said the Times’ spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Hall in response to a call to the Times’ attorneys seeking comment.

Palin is represented by Locke of Clare Locke in Washington, D.C., and Joseph Oliveri from the firm’s office in Alexandria, Virginia. Kenneth G. Turkel, Shane B. Vogt and Bajo Cuva of Cohen Turkel and Preston Ricardo of Golenbock Eiseman Assor Bell & Peskoe acted as co-counsel on the case.

The Times is represented by Lee Levine of Ballard Spahr in Washington, D.C., David A. Schultz of the firm’s New York office and David E. McCraw, the top newsroom lawyer for the Times.

Palin filed her suit in June 2017, just days after the Times ran its editorial in the wake of a shooting at a Congressional baseball practice in Virginia. In her complaint, Palin said attacks against her “inflame passions and thereby drive viewership and web clicks to media companies.”

Palin claimed the editorial in question, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” linked her to a 2011 shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed, and Giffords was shot in the head. She survived the shooting with serious injuries.

Prior to the shooting in Tucson, Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, distributed a flier showing the geographic location of Giffords’ district and others, under stylized crosshairs marking them as targets to be flipped from Democratic to Republican. 

In the first published version of the editorial, the Times erroneously stated the PAC’s flier featured crosshairs over the faces of Democratic lawmakers and that the “link to political incitement was clear” with regard to the shooting in Tucson.

The Times’ own reporting, and an ABC News story hyperlinked to the editorial, stated there was no link between the political literature and Loughner’s actions. The Times twice corrected the piece.

Considering the Times’ motion to dismiss the suit, Rakoff ordered an evidentiary hearing, featuring the testimony of the editorial’s author, James Bennet. At the hearing, Bennet recounted the research and publication process behind the editorial and answered questions about his knowledge of the Loughner shooting six years earlier, according to the Second Circuit’s ruling. 

Rakoff, relying on evidence produced at the hearing, dismissed the complaint for failing to show actual malice, saying the editorial contained a “few factual inaccuracies” that were “very rapidly corrected.”

“Negligence this may be,” Rakoff said. “But defamation of a public figure it is plainly not.”

In its decision Tuesday, the Second Circuit panel acknowledged the First Amendment concerns in the case but noted that “at this stage, our concern is with how district courts evaluate pleadings.”

The case is captioned Palin v. The New York Times.

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