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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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This week in the dankest timeline: Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with Sandy Hook families’ backing.

Yes, a site for unbelievable comedy playing to the biases of the gullible is now owned by the Onion. It appears they intend to use it to promote gun control. I can only hope this is presented in the style of existing InfoWars schlock.

While I deeply disagree with gun control activists, I’d much rather the site goes to them than to Jones’s merchandising companies. One of them was apparently the runner-up. But it’s alright for Jones: he’s allegedly on the short list for Trump’s next press secretary. Wait, no, that was last year. It was also only ever going to be a temporary fling, but that’s a given for the position.

I suppose Jones will have to keep shouting at globalists under a different brand.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

It's probably my mere-mortal unsophistication compared to highfalutin' lawyers, but "eleventy gazillion dollars" civil judgments seem much, much more like violations of the spirit of the Eighth Amendment than prohibitions on sidewalk camping do.

Apparently, Jones should have just claimed that being a kooky conspiracy theorist is a status.

If Jones had killed those kids the civil suite would have been a fraction of this.

What makes you think that? As someone whose job it is to evaluate cases for settlement potential, it would be high but not totally out of line considering the heinous nature of the act and the age of the victims. High sympathy factor plus incredibly unlikable defendant means big verdict. 1.44 billion divided by 28 victims equals about 50 million per, which is less than a lot of cases you've never heard about. Like the products liability case against Mitsubishi that netted a single plaintiff nearly a billion dollars. Or the medical malpractice case that awarded over 100 million to a child born with cerebral palsy. Or the 50 million mesothelioma verdict awarded to the widow of a guy in his 60s (and that was back in 2010).

Can you provide a link for the Mitsubishi award? I did a simple Google and couldn’t find it.

Assuming you mean “civil suit,” yeah. It would have been a criminal case rather than a tort, and he would most likely have ended up with multiple life sentences, since Connecticut banned the death penalty that same year.

If Alex Jones had killed those kids with overwhelming evidence pointing to him, but somehow been found not guilty in a criminal case, then the parents of the murdered children had sued him in a class-action civil suit for wrongful death in which he'd been found guilty (à la OJ Simpson), the amount of damages he would've been ordered to pay would've been lower than this. OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.

Those cases aren't really comparable, but even using the OJ verdict as a guide you still get pretty close and possibly higher if you take the right factors into consideration. the Sandy Hook kids had 25–30 years of life expectancy on the OJ victims, which greatly increases the verdict potential. And while I don't know if Connecticut allows parental loss of consortium claims, the nature of the relationship increases the value of the case. The 8.5 million in compensatory damages awarded to the Goldmans for the loss of their son would cover emotional distress and loss of companionship. The loss of companionship damages would be higher in the case of a small child who lives with the parents, as opposed to an adult child who moves out, so a Sandy Hook parent can expect more in that respect.

The other technical thing that I wouldn't expect you to know about is that the jury didn't award any significant compensatory damages for Nicole. Their are two kinds of cases filed on behalf of deceased Plaintiffs: Wrongful Death cases and survivor actions. Wrongful death cases compensate the heirs of the deceased person for their loss, and are usually associated with deaths that occur fairly quickly after the incident. Survivor actions compensate the actual decedent for his own damages, and usually occur either when a Plaintiff dies after the lawsuit has been filed or when the Plaintiff survives for a significant time after the injury. In a straightforward murder case, a survivor action is of limited value because there are no medical bills and only a few minutes of pain and suffering (as opposed to, say, a car accident victim who survives for a few years after the accident and racks up a ton of medical bills and is confined to a nursing home the whole time).

Since a wrongful death action is for the heirs, it requires the heirs to testify as damage witnesses. Nicole Brown Simpson's heirs were her children, and the family did not want to subject them to testimony concerning their mother's death and how they were affected by it. In turn, they waived the wrongful death claim and only filed a survival action, leaving significant compensatory damages on the table. The compensatory damages for the survival action were de minimus, and only served to set up the punitive damage claim. The Sandy Hook parents don't have this problem, so we can expect every Plaintiff to have a wrongful death claim. It should also be noted that Ron Goldman's mother didn't ask for punitive damages, though she was entitled to them.

Let's say Germany decided to bring the hammer down on some Shoah denier. It sentences him to life in prison, and assuming he is quite young and genetically excellent, he spends 100 years behind bars. This is 876600 hours. Each hour of Shoah deniers life spent unfree would have to valued at 1255 USD in order for his punishment to equal to that meted out to Jones.

This would be a draconian punishment by any standard, yet as you can see it pales to camparison to Jones's. And Jones denied an atrocity of a much much smaller scale.

Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss. There were 15 plaintiffs in the case, and each was awarded about 64 million in compensatory damages. The judge then added on another 30 million per plaintiff in punitive damages (and if there ever were a case for punitive damages, this is the one). On a per-plaintiff basis, it's more like 35 dollars an hour for the punitive part. And he didn't lose the suit because he denied the event had happened in a general sense. An equivalent to your analogy would be if a holocaust denier, who admits that he actually believes the holocaust really happened, publicly denied it, claimed specific survivors were merely actors, posted their addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged a decade-long pattern of harassment for the purpose of making money.

Anyway, the analogy doesn't hold because it suggests that civil verdicts should be dependent on how highly you value time incarcerated. If you destroy a piece of artwork worth tens of millions of dollars, the theoretical civil settlement will be worth a lot more than the max 7 years in prison if you're doing some kind of hourly rate equivalent.

Punitive damages are literally trying to punish someone; not make the plaintiff whole.

As a litigator, I'm well aware. I wanted to point out that the bulk of the damage award had nothing to do with punishment. In cases with multiple victims, the numbers can get very big very quickly.

But you started off saying:

“Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss.”

Damages clearly are about making victims whole. Punitive damages are about trying to regulate behavior (ie deterrence). That is, civil suits are in part about making the victim whole and in part about regulating behavior.

Yeah, sorry if I made that confusing.

Why stop at life in prison? Terry Nichols could meet Jones’ penalty at only $7.70 an hour.

But neither he nor Jones are expected to actual pay the balance of that debt. There’s a ceiling on how much you can penalize one person with one lifetime, and everything past that is about certainty. Terry Nichols will stay in prison for the rest of his life. Alex Jones will lose his assets. Why try to compare apples to oranges?

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