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Comment by tareqak | Hacker News Reader

What’s a fair price for being responsible for causing a false arrest then?

The only entity responsible for causing a false arrest are the police, as they are the ones that have the authority to arrest. Unless they were intentionally given fraudulent information, I don’t see how anyone other than the police are responsible for a false arrest, it is their duty to do due diligence.

It seems likely that Apple said that they had video of him stealing from them. But they obviously don't. So if they said that, they were lying.

I don’t know why you’re bringing up these hypotheticals: Apple is equally likely to have not lied to the police. Do you believe they were purposely acting in bad faith?

I'm not arguing that they "act[ed] in bad faith".

I'm arguing that they misused data that they had. And so they actually didn't have enough evidence to file a police report.

But it's also arguable that the police screwed up, by not noticing that the photo from the video didn't match the suspect. So maybe the kid should also sue the police for false arrest.

No idea, that’s something that will be decided if the the lawsuit ever goes to court. But I’m pretty sure that the final value will be significantly less than a billion dollars.

so why does it matter what he originally "asks" for. The court will decide not the accuser.

Because it looks like the person is using it to drum up publicity, possibly in an attempt to get Apple to pay them a decent settlement to get the media to shut up. I’m not really a fan of people using the legal system in this way.

What should be the exact dollar amount to avoid "looking like he's using it to drum up publicity"? You presumably have some idea of what the "right answer" is since your gut is telling you $1bn is too much.

If I was mistreated by the police for a few days with no permanent harm, arrester on insufficient evidence, the police should pay me a few hundred or thousand dollar a day, maybe. Apple should pay nothing because because they did nothing wrong by sending evidence to the police.

The real problem is that the government considers arrest without conviction to be a civil duty, not a tort.

I dunno, maybe a couple thousand dollars, assuming there was no permanent harm?

Obviously there’s permanent harm from an arrest. Have you never submitted a visa application?

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