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"the worst first amendment case I've ever seen" just had a good ending! You can read his summary (CEO of FIRE who lead the case) or mine.
A while back, a retired police officer Larry Bushart posted a political meme on Facebook mocking conservatives over the concept of not caring about kids who get shot in schools while cancelling people for not caring about Charlie Kirk's death.
In response, Perry County officials where he lived had him arrested and held in jail for 37 days, setting his bond at 2 million dollars. He lost his job from this disruption and missed his granddaughter's birth and his wedding anniversary.
This arrest was obvious bullshit, another case where corrupt abusive officials utilize the legal system itself as punishment. No one would have seriously expected this case to go through, but the process itself is often meant as the attack.
It ends with good news though, as part of the settlement Bushart is getting almost a million dollars. Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
But this is a great lesson at least. In the US, you can just be a random guy, upset the most powerful government organizations and draw their ire, and win against them. America is a country where David can take down Goliath, whether it be your local officials or federal ones. Bushart refused to accept the abuse, he stood up to the bullies, and he won.
This was a clear violation of established civil rights and the victim deserves restitution.
But $835,000 is a lot of money. That is more money than I have made in my entire life. Even in the "good" endings, I shudder to look directly at the massive roulette wheel that is American tort litigation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation for what I think would be a fair settlement (all figures approximate):
Lost wages: $10,000
Physical discomfort: $100,000
Emotional distress: $15,000
Missing life events: $10,000
Legal fees: $50,000
This comes to a total of $185,000. I cannot imagine a fudge factor big enough to make up the extra $650,000. That's pure profit in my book. This isn't even particularly large for a civil rights settlement. Insane that we just accept this.
There is a concept called punitive damages. WP:
Sometimes a defendant is liable for damages but did not commit an act of evil. If you crash a car into another car because a marten had chewed on some cables or conducts, resulting in your car behaving unexpectedly, that is just bad luck, and justice would be satisfied if you paid for the repair costs of the other car. If you damaged another car because you were participating in an illegal street race, that would be different, especially if you are rich enough that the repair bill would not hurt you.
If any other gang had kidnapped and held this guy for more than a month, they would be looking at long prison sentences, which would be sufficient to prevent a repetition at least in the short term and hopefully generally through setting the correct incentives. Cops enjoy wide-ranging immunities, so it is not feasible to prove malicious conduct to the point where we can just sentence them to lengthy prison sentences to set incentives.
Sometimes, the justice system will hold an innocent man in prison and he will be lucky if he gets an apology with his freedom. This can happen as a result of honest mistakes. "Given a professional investigation, we concluded at that time that you were very likely the killer, so we locked you up. Later evidence came in which exonerated you, but we could not have reasonably gotten that evidence any earlier. Sorry, shit happens." Good luck getting anything from the state in such cases. Societies reasonably does not want cops to not arrest killers out of fear they will need to pay compensation for arresting the wrong guy later.
But what happened to that guy should not have happened, ever. The police did not act in good faith, nor did the judge. There is no tradeoff for providing a huge negative incentive.
Per WP, Perry county has a population of about 9k, so the damages awarded would come to about 100$ per capita, which is hopefully enough that it will be felt by the electorate and push their gradient descent into electing less terrible officials, and generally provide a healthy incentive not to violate 1A rights.
(As an European, I think it is very silly to let a population of less than 10k have its own branch of the justice system. In Germany, an instance of an Amtsgericht (our lowest court, which would sign off on prison for being a danger to others) represents 130k people on average.)
And that it happened reveals a deep rot in the United States system. It is too easy for low-lifes to arrest, charge, and imprison good people. Part of that is that standards need to be raised for cops and it should be possible to earn rights against cops through demonstration of good character. Cops are really for harassing the bottom 10% of society, whereas a cop should be shaking in fear when addressing someone from the top 10% of society if they don't have a warrant of some kind in hand from a court run by those same people. Charges are too easy: most laws should be abolished. Leaving murder, assault, stealing, and similar laws. They exploited a shitty law to arrest this guy which criminalized speech without demonstration of harm being done. That's like a JS api in your browser that lets websites run shell commands on your system. The cops are the website and they super duper pinky promise to only run good commands. The design is so flawed that the consequences are obvious. Imprisonment: the United States is too punitive and the sentences are unjust in most cases. Emphasize criminal record in sentencing and make it almost impossible to imprison someone with a clean record who didn't commit a violent crime for more than one year. There are too many ways to go to prison for over a decade in the United States by harming nobody and having a clean criminal record. That's ripe for exploitation: imprisonment is normalized. And the excuse for this is mostly that Americans need to do something with the underclass. But none of this effectively deals with the underclass as could the system I describe which is not exploitable in the same way.
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According to the linked tweet, he lost his job, not merely wages, so you'd have to compensate for future wages lost and possibly reputational damage?
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I agree, these settlements are absurd. The other thing that I recall is Alex Jones supposedly paying out $1.4 billion with court ordering to liquidate everything he owns be it InfoWars or his personal assets. Mind you there were 15 plaintiffs representing 10 victims and he had to pay from $28.8 million to $120 million. Now I am not defending Jones and his character here, but it seems excessive to me especially because of course Jones is not a billionaire and has only fraction of that money, but at the same time he cannot declare bankrupcy. So he will have to pay damages for the rest of his life. He basically became something like indentured servant to those people.
I am not sure if this is a normal practice in USA especially for verbal crime. But even for some other crime - is it normal for a criminal to be sued for billions thus becoming basically indentured servant for his victim? Surely raping or crippling somebody is much worse than ranting on internet, I guess the damages should be in trillions. It seems insane to me how arbitrary this is, but I guess this is what we get from jury system which is basically a theater where regular people can use state power for their own power trips.
Who knows. Maybe if you were on that jury you would have come out to the same conclusion.
Likely not because he's not a median juror. A median juror however thinks Alex Jones is a le bad rich guy and that the cops in the OP's case we Just Doing Their Job. Because the median juror is a 100 IQ worker with cop brothers and cousins and zero filthy rich 120+ IQ internet entertainer family members.
I think "100 IQ worker with cop brothers and cousins" would also get filtered out (unless the defense is a joke at jury selection).
Depends on the state. In my state, as long as they can repeat "but I can be fair and impartial," trial judges put them on juries and the appellate courts have no issue with it.
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Good luck filtering most of the population.
Being too close to a cop will get you filtered out of a jury. Juries are mostly teachers and retirees.
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The issue that led to the Jones awards being so high was his refusal to participate in the process in good faith. He ignored the suit rather than defend it and got a default judgment against him, and when the case went to trial for damages he played games with regard to discovery. If the jury thinks you aren't taking things seriously and are trying to hide assets, they're going to punish you for it, and there's nothing you can do about it, because the time to do something about it was before you got soaked.
Assuming everything you said is accurate (which Jones denies but he is an interested party) 1.4b is still orders of magnitude too large.
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That was a special case. Jones failed to comply with the judge's orders regarding discovery, so he was punished with a default judgment—i. e., he was not permitted to make arguments reducing the damages claimed by the plaintiffs. (At least I think that's what happened. IIRC, some people on this website think that the judge's orders were not reasonable, or Jones did make good-faith efforts to comply with them but the judge unreasonably interpreted those efforts as bad-faith, or something like that.)
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Punitive damages for public sector organizations should be paid for by the organization and go to a generalized scaled tax rebate depending on jurisdiction. So ever tax payer in the municipality gets a few dollars in tax rebates and the department pays.
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Punitive damages can push that way up, since they aren't linked to anything suffered by the victim. They can't have the perpetrator getting away with a small slap on the wrist, so they bumped it up a lot. The money had to go somewhere, so it went to the victim.
He was lucky that the perpetrators acted egregiously when they harmed him (because the total compensation he received outweighs his total harms), but I can't think of a better way to do it.
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It is simultaneously not enough money and the wrong people are paying out. The people, cops/judges/staff etc should be personally liable for the money and/or jailtime. I am saying this despite finding the wronged party personally dislikable.
That's easy to say in a case like this, but would abolishing qualified immunity in the US not just result in unlimited lawfare against any government officials enforcing anything with a political dimension, which would presumably lead to said government officials becoming reluctant to do so? Expect impunity for [whatever group pisses you off the most] first, and subsequent further incineration of the commons.
Really, my sense often is that the US would stand to benefit from having its entire legal system burnt down and rebuilt from scratch. So many of your problems, including healthcare costs and inability to build infrastructure, ultimately can be traced back to the possibility of being dragged to court and having to spend the GDP of a minor country on lawyers (because if you don't and the other side does then you lose and are on the hook anyway).
Fixed it for you. Garden variety apolitical cranks and ODCs know how to hire lawyers.
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The problem is not the idea of qualified immunity, the problem is 1) the standard for how close the previous case has to be to the current one to be "clearly established", and 2) the fact that you can throw a case out for not being clearly established without establishing it for the next case.
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If so, mission accomplished.
Well, just to be clear, the primary example I was thinking of were various minorities that beat the curve in terms of criminal proclivities. Surely there is no shortage of Blue NGOs that would be happy to make an example out of the occasional randomly selected police for giving traffic ticket to a black person. Is disincentivising that a mission you want to see accomplished too?
If
The ticket is legitimate
The NGOs suing can themselves be sued for frivolity
The cop has nothing to fear. Although I can imagine a lawsuit for a frivolous lawsuit for a frivolous lawsuit…getting out of hand.
I believe that generally, the law should, only and be heavily incentivized to, be applied in obvious cases. In ambiguity, the justice system does nothing, except ensures the defendant has a way to prevent or at least record future infractions.
For example:
If someone runs over the speed limit, they get fined. If someone is wrongly fined and has their own evidence, they appeal, and get repaid with extra. If someone is wrongly fined but has no evidence, better luck next time: they can start recording their speed, so if they’re caught again they’ll have evidence to reverse both cases.
If someone has a legitimate claim, they sue. If someone is clearly illegitimately sued, they counter-sue. If someone is illegitimately sued but can’t prove obviousness, both parties waste their time.
Rulings can be appealed a fixed number of times, possibly zero. The appeals themselves will waste everyone’s time, unless the defendant can prove (beyond reasonable doubt) that the prior ruling was clearly wrong (not just ambiguous), or the plaintiff can prove the defendant’s new argument is frivolous (or clearly the same as their old argument).
My basic reasoning is: the more the law is enforced by letter, the more it can be sidestepped (broken in spirit). The more it’s enforced by spirit, the more susceptible it is to corruption, and corruption in the law is more dangerous than corruption in other institutions. If the law is only enforced in obvious cases, both issues are reduced: the letter is too unambiguous to sidestep, corrupting the spirit would be too obvious. Meanwhile, other institutions with softer enforcement can counter non-obvious infractions, either by making them obvious to the law, or using ambiguity to their advantage. The law (by itself) doesn’t prevent crime, so at least some of these other institutions are necessary anyways.
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I forget how weakly-qualified immunity is justified.
I understand why state officials should have more ability to use violence than citizens, including ability to make reasonable mistakes (i.e. immunity). But there should be a limit for egregious (either intentional or unacceptably incompetent) mistakes. Why is the limit so high?
We have too much petty crime, yet qualified immunity seems to boost it, by shielding cops from punishment for not handling it. I also have the impression that there are many regions where most people don’t respect their cops. In these ways, reducing qualified immunity would increase enforcement, and (by making cops more respected by locals) improve job conditions and morale.
You wouldn’t be able to staff police in those areas.
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I think that failure to enforce laws and qualified immunity for violating rights are entirely separate issues.
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"We have lawyers like other countries have rats."
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On the other hand, would you like the police to be able to violate your rights anytime they feel like it, knowing that the only consequence the municipality will face is a measly sub-$200,000 fine? (They, of course, won’t face any consequences themselves regardless.)
If you don’t make the consequences at least moderately painful, the government won’t have any reason to care if it runs roughshod over people’s rights.
Other countries have not this disproportionate payout and still are lawful.
Other countries mostly do not elect their sheriffs and judges.
In Germany, both police and judges are civil servants employed by the state following a standard career path. While there are certainly reports about Nazi chat groups among cops and there is the odd scandal of justice once every few decades, I would say that compared to the US both institutions are relatively fine here.
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