The Media, Medicine, Elections, Court Decisions... "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You..."

Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that the jury will continue to deliberate on whether the New York Times is liable for defaming Palin. 

If the jury comes back with a verdict finding the NYT was not liable, the judge will allow the jury's verdict to stand. 

If the jury finds the Times liable, Rakoff is expected to set aside its verdict and replace it with a verdict as a matter of law in favor of The New York Times.

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Sounds like, they just can't lose.  The jury's "vote" is irrelevant.  Can we just agree, this is verrry bad "optics" if you want regular folk to keep on trustin' in the system?

Very bad optics:  "If ya win, we accept the jury decision, but if ya's lose, we say the jury had no business decidin' in the first place.  How'z that sound?" (I'm imagining the Judge with a big cigar clamped 'tween his teeth...)

It's not just bad optics though.  It's what happens in countries that lose that institutional faith, and often rightly so.  What happens, is not that people give up on justice.  It's that people ... take the law into their own hands, bypassing the courts.

What James Bennett was so intent on pinning on Sarah Palin -- to the point of re-writing the editorial to insist on making his debunked point -- to politically help to bring her down is what poorly thought-out decisions like this do to help create an underground "gun" society, like we see in places like Mexico and Italy.  Journalists get shot up, and nobody wants to talk, or stick it out in the profession.  Judges refuse to take cases and hear evidence about elections, people protest in the streets, same way they do when they see police officers kneeling on suspects.

I've never in my life seen a judge send a jury out to decide a case without first determining if the elements of the charge have been met.  THAT is the time -- after the arguments are all over -- the judge decides if there is enough there for the jury to rightly make a decision.  Both judge and jury had heard all the facts at the close, before the jurors were sent away to deliberate.

Now, you know what it kinda looks like, in skeptical and questioning minds...

It kinda looks like somebody with money got to the judge.  Maybe something leaked about how the deliberations are going, and what was assumed to be a "slam dunk" case wasn't being viewed that way by jurors?

Of course, you can also "leak" to the jury what the judge just said, that the elements have not been met and the Times is not guilty.  If the jury confirms this, at this point, it hardly means they decided the case independently either.

I can't think of a better way to cause people to conclude the media and the courts and the Democrats are all in cahoots to go after Republicans -- from the gun-sites with Palin to the Russian-golden-showers hooker story with Trump to ... this.

Bravo, NYT.  Looks like you... "won".

Do better next time? Don't crack the champagne corks in celebration over this "victory".  It's really not.