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Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

The filings said the couple had been left "emotionally, psychologically, and physically" terrorised.

I always find it interesting that, when people sue other people/companies for some kind of harassment, they have to claim something like this. Shouldn’t it be obvious? Like, they got weird stuff by mail and got stalked. That should be enough? What if they didn’t actually got scared, what if they laughed at it? They were still harassed and this shouldn’t matter at all for the process and sentence.

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The crux is that all crimes have a list of elements which must be proven before the whole thing is a crime, or tort. Breaking this one down hypothetically using California’s Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress law, the plaintiff must prove that someone did something outrageous, that the defendant intended to cause emotional distress, that there was emotional distress, and that the emotional distress was from the defendants actions. So each of those individual things must be alleged, and proven with evidence. This is why they always allege things like being terrorized rather than not stating the obvious, because they wouldn’t be successful because they didn’t meet all the elements of the crime, or tort.

Note in the California law, it can be less than intentional (meaning, wanted and intended for the distress to happen) and can be as low as recklessly did something that they should have known would have caused distress, a lower bar than “intentional” for this particular element.

https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1600/1600...

I don't think that they were confused or in denial about whether it was necessary for purposes of a legal requirement. It seems that they were agnostic on that, and saying that it would be better if the law itself didn't require that emotional distress be asserted and proven.

My mistake. Looks like I can’t edit or delete my post at this point unfortunately.

Forensic psychology is a weird discipline that evolved more from legal precedents than social science research. There are standards for what counts as victimization, and incentives to categorize negative emotional responses as e.g. recurring episodes rather than chronic or permanent problems. Those legally-defined turns of phrase are like pinball bumpers that they have to hit to activate different levels of compensation.

That is just another fascinating side effect of society that I never realized but makes complete, obvious sense.

I laughed darkly at the pinball metaphor -- somehow the word "activate" is exactly right.

(IANAL) The amount you win in a lawsuit has to be based on actual damages so if you want to sue for emotional distress it has to fit the legal definition which depends on the jurisdiction. Since emotional distress isn't bound to any hospital bills or other quantifiable harm, it generally pays quite a bit more.

Also with any lawsuit you aim high and meet somewhere in the middle. Even if eBay won’t be liable for damages they may just settle this outside of court to get rid of it.

Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed.

I love “computer people incorrectly try to transfer their ‘expertise’ to law”. Gotta be one of my favourite parts of HN.

Sound to me like they're talking (their) philosophy rather than existing law. I for one agree, harassment shouldn't be considered lesser just because the victim admits to having a thick skin.

There’s a few things going on here. In a civil case, we are concerned with righting a wrong as much as we are with deterring future bad behavior. To attempt to undo damage, you need to know how much damage was done.

Additionally, some civil offenses do come with precomputed statutory damages, but it’s not possible to come up with such a number for every possible scenario. In the case where there isn’t a precomputed number available we fall back to computing a number after the offense happens based on the circumstances at hand.

There are problems either way.

If the fine is proportional to psychological harm, it punishes the victims who admit to having a thick skin.

If the fine is not proportional to psychological harm, it makes bullying the most sensitive people too cheap.

As an analogy, consider physical harm. We would probably agree that the punishment for slapping someone should be smaller than the punishment for murdering someone. However, what happens if someone is so exceptionally fragile that if someone slaps them, they literally die? What punishment should we apply? If you say "the punishment for murder", the accused will feel that this is unfair. But if you say "the punishment for slapping", then it means that if you know that someone is fragile like this, you can practically murder them for free.

Exactly

+9000. I agree. It is so tiring here.

You are free to leave at any time.

> Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed

Congratulations, you’ve turned the courts into a contest between theoretical models of what an act is “worth” instead of considering the facts and circumstances at hand.

Are you saying that as aggreement or disagreement? The court is already to settle dueling theoretical models, and it will still settle them by considering facts and circumstances. It should be quite exceptional for a crime to depend on the victim's mental state since someone who spends years learning how to accept the world as it is shouldn't be legally penalised.

Although I'm going to say that in the legal sense we might already be handling things this way. I'm sure the judges have considered this in depth.

> court is already to settle dueling theoretical models, and it will still settle them by considering facts and circumstances

No, it starts with the facts and circumstances and then lenses them through the law.

> should be quite exceptional for a crime to depend on the victim's mental state

It is. Emotional damage per se being remediable in law is mostly a myth. This is why we default to actual damages; it largely sidesteps alternate timelines and the unknowable mens rea.

Are you European by any chance? In the English speaking world, courts are typically adversarial and work by two competing interpretations (a prosecution/plaintiff and a defence/respondent) being fit to what happened.

If they don't have different models of what happens, the case usually won't make it to the court.

No, American, and have been involved in litigation and not a lawyer. I spent time growing up in Europe, but never professionally.

Litigators will frequently bring up contrasting legal theories. But you’re not allowed to go into hypotheticals when calculating damages.

As opposed to the concrete model of "she was a million dollars worth of sad"

> the concrete model of "she was a million dollars worth of sad"

What case are you citing? Because this rings truer for popular misconception of how law and equity work.

So if you show your fist to a child or to Mike Tyson it's the same threat?

> So if you show your fist to a child or to Mike Tyson it's the same threat?

Based on the meaning of the word threat, yes.

No. Think forward and imagine you escalate on the threat, by punching your interlocutor. Your act is the same in both cases, but the physical injury to Mike Tyson will likely be minimal whereas that inflicted upon the child would be significant, perhaps even severe. To say they were the same would be like considering two similar mathematical operations to be equivalent without considering the quantities involved.

Emotional injury would also occur, the child is growing and would interpret the act drastically differently than a world champion boxer

Thats risk. The threat is the potential action. The risk is the potential for loss or impact.

If I showed my fist to Mike Tyson, he's pretty likely to guess that I would fail miserably if I tried to follow through, and I'd be the one who ended up getting punched...and he'd be right. It's not crazy for the legal system to take that into account.

You're very wrong ! The suffering of the victim matters more than the ability of the culprit to act within a certain legal budget.

If someone found a small, legal "act committed = no fine" way to victimize someone to the point of suicide, do you think it should be left unpunished ?

Justice MUST be subjective.

>If someone found a small, legal "act committed = no fine" way to victimize someone to the point of suicide, do you think it should be left unpunished ?

Absolutely not. It should be punished. But if two people do the same thing to someone else, that must result in same damages.

>Justice MUST be subjective.

This is abhorrent.

If I send spiders to somebody who ordered it to feed a pet, or I send it to a museum, it's the same act. So same damages due?

No?

The first one asked for them, the second one didn't.

The question is:

If there are people 1 and 2, without any other information (like motive) available to us, who send spiders to a and b respectively without anything else being done wrong, a and b should receive same compensation and 1 and 2 the same punishment.

If courts can prove that say 2 knew that b was allergic to these spiders and sent them anyways, that's no longer about sending spiders but causing potential bodily harm.

This doctrine is used nowadays in many places already, ie trying to do something even if you don't succeed is criminal in many cases.

> The acts of intimidation included sending live insects, a foetal pig and a funeral wreath to the Steiners' home in Natick, Massachusetts.

> Baugh and his associates also installed a GPS tracking device on the couple's car and created posts on the website Craigslist inviting sexual encounters at their home, according to the filings.

Dunno, emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorized doesn't seem like a ludicrous way to describe that.

I imagine it's a necessary component to assessing damages. Aside from the criminal component, the claim of inflicted pain/suffering is necessary if they want to seek damages.

IANAL, but I suspect that claims along the lines that it didn't bother them, they found it amusing, etc would result in a much lower, if any, assessment of damages.

> they got weird stuff by mail and got stalked

The stalking is self evident. The bugs in a box thing is immature, but unlikely someone can get damages on per se.

Whether it should or not is a matter of opinion, but the law makes a distinction based on the state of motives of the perpetrator, and the consequences of their actions. Murder has a more severe punishment than attempted murder, and premeditated murder has a more severe punishment than spur-of-the-moment murder.

Look at the wording of the laws they’re referencing- and you’ll see why the terms are used.

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