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Notes -
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:
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.
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