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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it seems extremely weird.

$1 in compensatory damages means the jury decided that yes it was technically defamation, but that it was literally the smallest, tiniest, itty-bittiest amount of defamation that is possible. That it did about the same amount of damage to the scientist's career and reputation, as if he'd ordered delivery and discovered a can of soda was missing.

The idea that you could do $1 of damage and your punishment is $1,000,000 is just nonsensical. Either it did extensive damage to his career (years' worth of salary lost) and a million dollars is appropriate additional punishment, or it didn't and he wins a dollar because he was defamed but it did virtually no damage and the defendants merely have to pay his court costs or something.

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It’s just an unfortunate fact pattern. Compensatory damages are by design supposed to be a quantifiable number that you can directly point to on a ledger somewhere. Mann claims to have lost grants, and indisputably lost reputation, but has remained employed at a seemingly proper level throughout his career. Scientists don’t get kickbacks from grants, so no quantifiable losses _to Mann_ there. Loss of reputation is hard to quantify, though it is sometimes done by having a PR expert testify “this is how much it would cost to restore a person’s reputation to its previous state”, but considering Mann’s previous state was “unknown to the public”, that’s also tough to do. IIRC, Mann has had to have private security at various points, but that was paid for by his employer, so Mann can’t be compensated for it. It seems like in the absence of hard numbers like that, the jury decided to compensate using punitive rather than trying to make up a number, and no party is allowed to tell the jury that that will get struck down.

> Scientists don’t get kickbacks from grants

What? It was my impression that scientists draw salary directly out of the grant, and that many scientists do not earn any salary other than what comes out of their grants.

So Mann's salary is whatever, call it $500k/year, paid for by Penn State. He brings in grants to perform research that justify to Penn State why it's worth it to pay him that $500k/year (e.g. a $5M grant will include some amount for the PI + research assistants, some amount of lab spend, some amount of overhead to Penn State). If that grant doesn't materialize, Penn State is still on the hook for that $500k.

That's why it was tricky for Mann to prove damages here - Penn State was likely harmed, but Penn State didn't sue.

You get a salary that can be paid from the grants, but if you get $1m or $20M in grants it's not going to be a change in your salary. At least until you negotiate a higher salary. And if you don't get the grants in the next cycle, the university will be paying your salary.

Isn't most reputational damage very hard to conclusively prove for normal people?

If someone posts all over Twitter that I'm a fraudster and an asshole, and I feel like I'm having fewer prospective customers choose me to tile their bathroom and I'm getting fewer dates on Grindr - am I supposed to be able to prove that, and the causality in court?

Even if I somehow have detailed records of exactly how all of my dates have gone and how many prospective clients I've given quotes to - maybe there's just another tile guy who started asking for less, and I'm getting fewer dates because I got this garish pink mohawk.

It may seem counterintuitive, but reputation damages are "actual" damages.

Yes, they are hard to prove, but the jury gets to take that into account. It could have picked almost any number ($1m, $10m, etc.) for reputation damages, but that would go in the "actual" damages line on the form.

The "punitive" damages really are just to discourage future bad conduct. And it will be difficult to support the idea that it takes a $1m penalty to prevent future bad conduct worth $1.

The legal situation notwithstanding I actually kinda agree with this. You have to pay $1e6 in punitive damages because you were actively trying to defame him and we want you to be sufficiently disincentivized from trying it again. But since you failed so spectacularly and didn't do any actual harm to him personally or his career here's $1 actual of damages.

Can you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone? I think you have to take intent into account and here it's so blatantly purposeful.

No, because this is a civil suit, not a criminal one.

In a criminal one you are correct -- if you try to rob a bank and try but fail to kill a bunch of hostages, you're still going to jail for possibly the rest of your life.

But in a civil trial, the main point is the damages. Yes there can be a punitive element on top, but only if there are damages in the first place. If you attempt something bad but don't succeed, a civil suit can't punish you. It's not like a criminal trial.

This is why I said the legal situation notwithstanding. I know this is how it works but I think it's nonsensical. The existence of punitive damages already throws out the idea that civil suits are just about real measured harm and includes the state overlaying elements of criminality on top of civil suits to punish wrongdoing. To me the only consistent stances are either not having punitive damages at all and accounting for intangibles directly in the real damages or having punitive damages that are totally orthogonal to the real harm. And just like criminal cases we can account for attempted X being less severe than X.

> The existence of punitive damages already throws out the idea that civil suits are just about real measured harm and includes the state overlaying elements of criminality on top of civil suits to punish wrongdoing.

No, it has nothing to do with elements of criminality.

It's the simple fact that if civil actions resulted in only restitution and nothing more, then everybody would be committing torts whenever they could, because sometimes you'll get away with it and sometimes you won't, but statistically you'll always come out ahead. Because sometimes people don't bring charges, sometimes they're too hard to prove, etc.

So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence. To ensure that if we only count the suits successfully brought and prosecuted, the tort-committer will still lose overall in the end.

There's nothing to do with criminality here, which is prosecuted by the state rather than by a private party.

Our only disagreement seems to be semantics.

> So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence

That's exactly what I mean by elements of criminality. You're not just saying that you harmed someone and have to make them whole but also that you did something wrong and have to be punished so you won't do it again. It's a fine by another name.

> Can you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone?

Yes, there is typically differences in law between reckless endangerment, manslaughter, premeditated murder, hate crime additions, etc.

If one were to balance benefit/harm, if the jury found that the would-be defamers benefited Mann personally and professionally in the manner of the "Streisand Effect," would Mann need to pay them?

By my reading you're agreeing with me. Attempting murder is also a crime where here there isn't really "attempted defamation" despite the actions and intent of the would-be defamer being identical. If you believe any part of the justice system is supposed to act as a deterrent then sincerely trying and failing to harm someone else is an act worthy of punishment. You might argue that punitive damages ought to be collected by the state or destroyed but regardless their function is identical.

I don’t agree and not agree, just exploring the idea. I think the deterrent part of a justice system is to deter the person harmed from initiating or continuing a cycle of retribution that reduces civilization to ruin. If it could be a deterrent for people who do wrong, then it does a bad job of it. In reality the wrongs and rights people do are not their own, just random happenstance that configured a person to be in the position to act in a certain way at a certain time.

> an you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone?

As the great Sideshow Bob put it [1]: "Attempted murder", now honestly, what is that!? Do they give a Nobel prize for "attempted" chemistry? Do they?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQPNQ0PFSc

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