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Alex Jones just lost a lawsuit for defamation for claiming that Sandy Hook was a hoax and the reward was $965bil (after a previous $50mil verdict so its over a billion) for defamation and emotional damages. Jones is a kook, and his claim was both false, and outrageous; but I'm not 100 percent sure he even should have lost. Esp for the emotional damage part. I don't think people should be entitled to damages because they feel hurt by what you say. As far as the defamation part if he claimed particular people created the hoax then I can understand a loss of a defamation lawsuit, but if its just a general comment along the lines of "I think it's a hoax" I don't think he should face any legal penalty for it. And a billion dollars for spouting off some nonsense seems ridiculous to me.
I suspect that he will appeal (I understand he tried to appeal the previous case all the way up to the Supreme Court, who refused to accept the case), and that the case won't be overturned on appeal, but perhaps the damages will be reduced.
There was also some talk about harassment and death threats against people suing Jones. If it can be proven that Jones was behind it I suppose that could be ground for a lawsuit (and perhaps even criminal charges depending on the details), but that would be a separate issue than defamation or emotional distress over the original comment.
I hate these huge judgements. Justice can still be served without having to destroy someone's career which otherwise should be protected by the 1st amendment. Did these survivors and victims really experience $1 billion worth of trauma? At what point does justice cross into thirst for revenge? I hope Alex Jones fights this successfully to get it reduced to something that will not totally ruin him, not even because I agree with him, but this has a chilling effect on anyone whose career involves speech.
I wish there were some way to remove enough from large defenders to make their bad decisions hurt, but not give a windfall to victims far in excess of even the most generous view of the harms.
McDonalds really should lose a significant multiple of their annual coffee profits for keeping their coffee too hot to drink for years to reduce waste, but that doesn't mean that it's right for the burn victims and their attorneys to get several years worth of coffee profits, either.
But that's the mechanism to get people to invest time and effort in these lawsuits. For individual cases, giving the lawyers a shot at a huge payoff is what enables them to fight big companies with lots of resources to spend on defense. And in class action cases, especially those where most of the class members end up with $20 gift cards or a year of credit monitoring, most of the money goes from the defendant to the people who did all of the work putting together the case.
I don't mind a reward even a share of the punitive damages. I just wish it were smaller. I think punitive damages should be sized to harm defendants who deserve getting a huge judgement, I just don't like all of it going to plaintiffs whose harms are far smaller.
So when Weyland-Yutani kills a crew through extreme gross negligence l'd like them to eat a billion dollar fine. But I want the crews estates and attorneys to get damages and costs plus something more like 50 or 100 million enough to provide a good return on the suit but not all of the fine amount, then I want the rest of the money to disappear.
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