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Comment by entiex | Hacker News Reader

But these aren't puntive damages, they're compensatory damages, and plainly excessive ones at that. Alex Jones level of remorse has no bearing on the level of damage he caused, and so should have no bearing on the amount of compensatory damages. To the extent that they did, that's an injustice.

These damages are absolutely insane for emotional distress and defamation. The average lifetime earnings of a US citizen are $1.7 million. These damages essentially allege that each plaintiff suffered emotional distress so severe it was over forty times the average person's lifetime earnings. That's plainly absurd.

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> Alex Jones level of remorse has no bearing on the level of damage he caused

That's an excellent legal argument, is the kind of thing that could probably win before a judge... And has no bearing on what a jury finds. In general, the reasoning of a jury is private to the jury. They can award maximum damages because they think Jones is ugly (all you have to do is get fourteen people to agree that's a fair thing to do to the man; hypothetically, the averaging effect over so many folks is a back-stop. That back-stop backfires if the defendant is particularly loathsome; recall how long it took to seat a jury for Martin Shkreli).

This is why damages are, in so many places, not put before a jury.

I mean sure, but compensatory damages will be appealed and the jury determined amount will be overturned.

Probably. And when it happens, the overturn will be relative to where it is now. The jury's power here is still to send a clear message of what the public thinks, and that will factor into the judge's reasoning... For example, if a judge decides that it doesn't make sense for compensatory damages to be any higher than X, the jury has made clear that they expect 100% of X to be the damages level.

Is it really absurd? Losing a child to murder is already an awful outcome that most people never experience. Being accused of participating in conspiracy/cover up and told your child never existed makes that significantly worse. It would be horrible if some random crazy did that, but to have it done to you by a well-resourced media organization with nationwide reach and millions of devoted fans is the stuff of nightmares.

It's not hard to argue the ongoing security costs could easily reach that amount. i.e Security for trump and family cost 30 million in 2017 and these families would suffer similar political targeting. Though ofcourse we can argue that trump was purposefully inflating those costs to enrich himself. But even then we're only talking 120 mil per family for quite possibly the rest of their lives.

While I think there are many people would forgo that protection or pay less for protection it's one of the ineffable personal balances of security/cost/ease of life that I could easily see a jury saying "if they went the perfect security route then they could easily spend this much".

You can't ignore that cost just because they'd normally never earn enough to pay for that security... much like a company that causes an illness is on the hook for cost of treatment even if a person couldn't normally afford to treat themselves.

What does the lifetime earnings of the plaintiff have to do with anything? Jones made money by lying about these people. The value of the reputations he destroyed is not what you think it should be, not what you think would be average earnings for a different person, but rather what the market paid to the liar for his lies and the economic benefit he gained from them.

His lies had a measurable value of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, so the plaintiffs' reputations had that value, and damages should be calculated against that.

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