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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.
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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?
I don't know if this is a fun fact or unfun fact, but it is amazing either way and I say thank you for it.
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