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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

You cause a lot of damage, you get a lot of punishment.

It's not a punishment, it's a debt. If you steal a sandwich and eat it you'll be fined, that's a punishment and a transaction with the state, and you'll also pay the owner damages, which is not a transaction with the state.

Only in the most legalistic sense.

How so? Is the difference between having to repay Lisa when you've caused her harm and having to pay the state because you did something criminal that hard for you to understand that you actually consider it a matter of "legalistic" quibbling?

Would you accept a jurisdiction where, instead of going to prison, you could just pay someone a bunch of money after you've raped or performed some other obviously criminal act against them?

When the assessed damages are way out of proportion, that's in the realm of "making an example", i.e. punishment.

Who are you quoting?

None of what I've written in this thread is about the correctness in how damages are measured, I don't see the relevance of your comment. To me it seems like you're confusing suffering with punishment. Debt is commonly painful, but it's not a punishment.

The purpose of paying damages is to substitute someone else for harm you've caused. This is altogether another purpose than punishments. Paying damages is a reparation, punishment is based in another set of principles.

I know this is a distinction relevant elsewhere in this thread, but I don’t think it affects the point I made.

Actually generally for emotional damage you don't. In the US you're perfectly free to insult someone and hurt their feelings without being liable to pay them damages.

That hugely depends on the circumstances.

No it really doesn't. There are no legal consequences for insulting someone, unless you actually defame them. Nearly all defamation cases are dismissed by the court immediately for not rising to the very high level of facts required for defamation.

The interesting precedent here is if you lie about the dead (who until this fiction, had no protection from defamation), you have defamed any living person who says the opposite and factual information about them.

But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."

We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."

Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.

Interesting analysis... one potential wrinkle: There is no precedent being set here. This is just the expected outcome within the framework set by past precedent... Nothing novel or new happened wrt the law or anything else. It's just a bog standard case of a trashy asshole riling up his idiotic followers for money, and taking it well beyond the long established line of acceptable.

Yes, defamation. Many such cases are dismissed; this one was not and resulted in large punitive damages being awarded.

Less relevant to this case, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress can also both be against the law in the United States.

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