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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.
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.
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.
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