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Comment by nixdev | Hacker News Reader

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The court system worked very well in this case. A set of parents brought a civil lawsuit against a well-known man who was spreading what they thought were lies and inflicting emotional distress. Jones had plenty of time to respond, and he decided not to. Therefore, the case was decided in default, as is the way all civil cases would have been. Then, a jury of his peers was brought in to decide on the size of the penalty. After hearing evidence, and giving Jones a chance to respond and question (which his lawyers absolutely failed to do effectively), the jury decided on a penalty. This is a very simple case of a civil court system working as intended. Just because Jones lies to his audience and his audience is beholden to Jones's view of the world, does not mean the court system is malfunctioning. Listen to Knowledge Fight, it's better than InfoWars.

I'm a bit confused. Whilst you don't explicitly say it, are you not suggesting it would be better for the public's opinion of the justice system to not sanction Alex Jones to the full extent of the law, if at all?

Your first sentence is that the courts have to be impartial and functional. Ignoring the influence Jones has on the public and fully executing the law as it is laid out by taking InfoWars from Jones sounds like the courts are acting perfectly impartially and functionally.

> Ignoring the influence Jones has on the public and fully executing the law

What "law" exactly do you think needs to be "executed"? Defamation laws? Were these defamation laws ever argued in court? Did you actually follow the trial?

The court claimed that Alex Jones didn't provide documents, documents that never existed, and defaulted him. The defamation laws were never argued in the court case. This action by the court is deprivation of rights, due process rights, under color of law. The judge is a criminal.

If the courts don't function properly, this creates an extremely dangerous climate.

We are laughing at the gay frogs man here. Get out if here with you mature analysis of the death of the judicial branch of the United States.

This is a ridiculous comment. They basically refused to participate in the trial, so much so that they got a default judgment against them. Any reasonable observer sees what happened here. You’re not fooling anyone.

Have you missed the bit where Jones's lawyer sent a full copy of his phone to the plaintiff's legal team. Alex Jones says, no lies, a lot of things but the evidence that he lies is there https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/03/alex-jones-s...

I did not miss this. I followed this closely as it happened. And this "gotcha" right here, that he does not have perfect memory of all of his text messages sent over the two years previous, was the most significant allegation that has been brought to light against him.

And, those text messages revealed nothing of substance, they had nothing to charge with him with. They didn't even attempt to charge him. They didn't even go after the supposed perjury charge because it was weak. If it wasn't weak, they would certainly go after him for it.

Nobody has a perfect memory of all text messages they have sent over the last couple of years. If you think you have a perfect memory of all text messages you have sent over the last couple of years, you don't understand your own memory. Let alone a guy who runs a business with 20+ employees reading a deluge of news articles and whitepapers from when he gets up to when he goes to sleep.

You're being intellectually dishonest, the argument was never that he did not have "perfect memory of all his text messages," it was that in discovery he claimed he searched for and found _no_ text messages pertaining to Sandy Hook, when in fact the evidence accidentally revealed by his own counsel showed that relevant messages did exist, and were retained. A perfunctory search for the term "Sandy Hook" should have turned up those text messages, meaning he either lied about performing the search, or (more likely) lied about the search not turning up anything. Either way, abuse of discovery.

> Whether this is actually true or not (and I haven't looked into)

sounds about right

> We must not forget that for a functioning democracy, *impartial and functioning courts* are absolutely essential

Very important for people to remember universally.

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