Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on.
Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.
Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.
Compensatory damages are awarded in an attempt to compensate the plaintiff for the damage they received due to the actions of the defendant. Punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff on top of the compensatory damages and their exact purpose is to punish the defendant for their actions.
They are two different types of damages and the exact purpose of punitive damages is to be a punishment. It's their raison d'etre. They were created to provide further levers to punish people.
Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055864452/alex-jones-found-l...
They then had a jury trial to determine damages were in the billions (lol)
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4996347/alex-jones-liqu...
And lost in all this is what jones actually did… which in my judgement is not even liable and we wouldn’t even know because a trial was never held —
https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/here-exactly-what-al...
Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars
Which his lawyer then mistakenly sent to the Plaintiff's lawyer, so, they did have them.
Also FYI 'a trial was never held' is a common talking point used by Alex Jones on his program. He and his lawyers are responsible for there not being a trial. Their conduct guaranteed that there was no trial. It's a farce for him to complain about something that he is responsible for.