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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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

Edit: How to get the answer to a question online? Be wrong. I appreciate all the work; so what I am seeing is that if Jones did kill all these kids damages might approach this judgment which I think pretty clearly demonstrates just how egregious this judgment is.

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).

Are murderers sued in civil court for damages?

The O. J. Simpson case comes to mind. He was acquitted of murder in a criminal trial, but was successfully sued in civil court. Copying from Wikipedia:

In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown. The Goldman family was awarded damages totaling $34 million ($64 million adjusted for inflation), but as of 2024 have received a small portion of that.

So if actually murdering two people only results in a $64 million fine, how in the hell is Alex Jones liable for $1,1 billion for spreading admittedly-hurtful conspiracy theories? He didn't do direct harm; he just said stupid and hurtful shit on the internet.

Yes.

Wrongful death actions can be pursued against a person also facing criminal charges for the same event. Even if the person is not found guilty of a criminal charge, he may still be found liable for wrongful death due to the lower burden of proof in civil court.

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.

Ah, but what if it was a full moon? I don’t want to break out the tide charts, but I bet you could clear a billion, easy.

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.

That's not how this works. First, the civil suit divvied up damages in a non-intuitive manner. OJ was found liable for $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the parents of Ron Goodman, and for $12.5 million in punitive damages each to the estates of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. (Rufo v. Simpson (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 581, 614). The compensatory damages for a single victim's murder, adjusted for inflation, would be $16,717,408.10 today. Multiplied for the 26 Sandy Hook victims, that's $434,652,610.60 in compensatory damages in a hypothetical Sandy Hook case.

However, there's significant reason to think that the Sandy Hook per-victim compensatory damages would be significantly higher than the California damages awarded against OJ. compensatory damages, per the California standard at the time, reflected the "loss of love, companionship, comfort, affection, society, solace, or moral support suffered as a result of the death, but not for their grief or sorrow or for the decedent's pain and suffering." Notably, "pain and suffering" are two concepts which routinely factor hugely into the size of jury verdicts in tort cases. There also was no reference to "economic damages" like lost wages, which are also a large driver of compensatory damage awards. I'm not a CT lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but a quick google turned up these civil jury instructions which, on page 121 (Instruction 3.4-7) lays out the types of damages permissible in wrongful death cases:

Wrongful Death Damages We have a statute that governs damages in cases such as this where there is a death. It allows for just damages which includes:

Economic damages of :

  1. the reasonable and necessary medical and funeral expenses and
  2. the value of the decedent's lost earning capacity less deductions for (his/her) necessary living expenses taking into consideration that a present cash payment will be made, and

Noneconomic damages of:

  1. compensation for the destruction of the decedent's capacity to carry on and enjoy life's activities in a way that (he/she) would have done had (he/she) lived and,
  2. compensation for the death itself, or
  3. pain and suffering.

The inclusion of pain and suffering and economic damages (if accurate) indicates to me that the per-victim award of compensatory damages would likely have been much higher in a hypothetical Sandy Hook wrongful death suit than in the OJ case, let alone the increased sympathy a jury would likely feel for the parents of murdered children versus the elderly parents of a middle-aged adult victim.

As regards the punitive damages, $12,500,000 in 1997 dollars is worth $24,584,423.68 today. Thus, a hypothetical Sandy Hook case awarding the same amount of per-victim punitive damages as the OJ case would have awarded $639,195,015.68. However, Connecticut handles punitive damages oddly, and in common law counts appears to restrict them to the prevailing party's attorney's fees, less taxable costs. (CT Jury Instruction 3.4-4). In other cases CT statute appears to mandate double or even treble damages. Frankly I'm too lazy to dig into what amount of punitive damages would have been available in this case, but this should demonstrate that calculating damages really is not as simple as just extrapolating from a different case in a different jurisdiction.

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.

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