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Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and now they all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:
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Is Alex Jones the appropriate comparison here? IIRC, Jones was perceived as causing harm because unrelated people harassed the people he was talking about, and the highly unusual scale of the penalty was justified by claiming that he failed to comply with the court's instructions in delivering evidence to the plaintiffs. Here the scale of the harm is much higher, and the connection to those committing it plausibly much more direct.
Does it really come down to "government agents are above the law?"
The scale of the punishment had exactly zero to do with his failure to comply with discovery. That failure resulted in a default judgment on the issue of liability alone.
The scale of the harm is not greater here. The parents were subjected to years of egregious harassment. In contrast, the CHOP was in existence for less than a month.
How many people did Alex Jone's listeners shoot as a result of the Sandy Hook Controversy? How many did they kill. How many business did they force out. How many buildings did they burn?
Temporal length is not the only means of measuring "damage."
No, temporal length is not the only measure of damage. That is why I said "egregious harassment."
None, but the Seattle lawsuit in question did not seek damages for the death of anyone, so that is irrelevant.
As I recall, many of the Sandy Hook parents were forced out of their homes.
None, but the lawsuit does not allege that the CHOP people did so either, so that is not relevant.
As I noted earlier, proving damages was going to be difficult for the Seattle plaintiffs, and if they had any realistic expectation of being able to prove huge damages, they would not have settled (of course, we don't know yet how large the settlement is; perhaps the settlement is indeed huge).
Everything you've said seems correct, as far as it goes. Do you see the disconnect between the questions being asked, and the answers you're providing, though? If so, do you think that disconnect is worth bridging?
To spell it out a bit, the core question you're responding to, as I understand it, is "is this outcome just, and if not, what went wrong?" Many here, myself included, believe that the city either directly or indirectly facilitated a very, very serious crime, and we would like to believe that our existing social mechanisms are capable of holding those who did so responsible. If they aren't going to be held responsible, it would be good to examine why that is: did the plaintiffs file the wrong type of suit? Hire the wrong lawyer? Something else?
People balk at the plain reading, which is that in many places in this country, state and local governments will allow leftist thugs to threaten, beat and murder ordinary citizens, and then carefully avoid investigating, arresting or prosecuting those responsible, either because they're too afraid or because they are allied with the thugs. Most people here lack legal training, but retain a belief that the situation isn't quite so bad that large-scale insurrection and public murder can be swept under the rug by the powers that be so long as the criminals are their criminals. So when they see exactly that happening, they grope for some alternate explanation, some way to rationalize the apparent madness. Responses like yours, while impeccably factual, do not actually resolve the deeper question.
Okay, so the local government allowed insurrection and murder, and then they destroyed large amounts of evidence of their deliberations and orders when they were sued over it. What follows? What should follow? What should we learn from this incident?
The most obvious answer is that you're legally shit out of luck if the government fails you. @gattsuru posted clear and egregious examples of governments utterly failing at their most basic duty of protecting their citizens, including Warren v. DC. That's a case where three women called the police during a home invasion. The cops showed up, casually looked around, then shrugged and left. The three women were beaten and raped over the next 14 hours. SCOTUS told everyone to pound sand because the state doesn't owe you shit.
Though practically abhorrent, the ruling is legally well-founded. With sovereign immunity as the well-established default, there's nothing within the four corners of the constitution that imposes any obligation on the state to lift a finger. The attenuated recourse is that maybe someday enough people are pissed that they get voted out of power. Passing a law or an amendment could fix this issue, but there isn't much appetite for it.
I remain deeply ammused that not only is "Social Contract Theory" bunk, but its official court doctrine that its bunk.
The state is under no obligation to protect you. You pay taxes and obey it because you are its slave. There is no exchange of of any good or service for you're obedience... you're just a coward who obeys because you're afraid
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I actually think the federal government had an obligation to intervene under the Republican government guarantee. CHOP claimed to be a new government that failed that guarantee and therefore there was an obligation by the federal government to crush this new government.
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Well, if that is the question, it is a bit misguided, in the following sense: The Seattle lawsuit was not seeking justice in the abstract; it was seeking compensation for the financial losses suffered by a very specific set of plaintiffs. You asked, "Is Alex Jones the appropriate comparison here?" -- The answer to that has to be "no," because the damages suffered by the plaintiffs in the two cases is very, very different. So, of course the outcomes will be very different (though we don't yet know the precise outcome of the Seattle case).
No, but it wasn't meant to. That deeper question is not a legal one, so the comparison to Alex Jones is not particularly fruitful. Whether the Seattle govt officials should be punished for the larger ostensible harm is a political question that ultimately must be decided at the ballot box; in contrast, whether Alex Jones should pay for the damages suffered by the parents is very much a legal question.
I think the objections you bring are reasonable and accurate: the people in this trial represent a handful of businesses with relatively minor harms over a shorter period.
There's a deeper question that is, if not legal, at least practical rather than political: under the neutral rules of our justice system, is there anyone bringing comparable tort here as in Jone's case? And that's actually kinda interesting, because there are!
Both the mother and father of Lorenzo Anderson, the 19-year-old killed at CHOP, have brought separate torts against, and while the mother's case is unlikely to succeed, the father's case received a half-million settlement. The father of Antonio Mays, the 16-year-old killed later in CHOP, only recently filed notice for a lawsuit; I'm not able to find much other information about that, or about the 14-year-old killed at the same time.
There's still some fun questions here that are descriptive, rather than normative, underneath that!
Why are these cases not being brought quickly and at high profile, and sometimes not being brought competently or at all? (The rioting goon squads are often judgement proof and difficult to identify for either political alignment, but where progressive defamation tends to mix a very distributed message by a variety of actors where the rich ones near-universally have deep legal defenses, Jones had a lot of cash and an obvious single name and a shallow/incompetent/intentionally-bad legal defense, and you don't even have to notice where the judges have a skeptical eye, or how the politics of the legal profession might have made pro bono or contingency services more available in one case than the other.)
Others are legal, rather than political -- are there no state claims that would not be subject to federal qualified immunity or state discretionary immunity doctrines, and if so, why are they not used against politicians and police in cases like this? (The Washington Tort Claims Act is theoretically broadly available, and there are relevant torts, but even after a successful trial judgement can not be served against the state against the will of its legislature, and the state attorney general is required to provide costs for individual state employee defenses if "purported to be in good faith" and "in the scope of official duties", and "any employees who receive such a defense can not have a valid judgement executed against them" instead being covered by the state at its choice.)
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Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ? It may not have lasted long, but there was quite a bit of damage.
In the western legal tradition, violent crime is not a tort, or at least not exclusively a tort. If Brown murders Jones, the case is The State of Maryland vs Brown not Jones vs Brown. This is because violent crime causes lasting damage to the social fabric. I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric. The knock on effects of delegitimizing the state's agents of violence are where most of the damage was.
Yes, but the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.
Yes, absolutely. But, again, the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.
The issue raised by the OP was why the two lawsuits led to differing amounts of damages. How "bad" an event is in the abstract is rarely an issue in a lawsuit. A lawsuit is about whether the defendant wrongfully caused damage to the plaintiff.
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