Hacker News Reader

Comment by skulk | Hacker News Reader

It's very simple. InfoWars did not defend itself in court. Fox news would have. CNN would have. Is it the court's job to defend every defendent?

The amount of comments opining here without knowing a smidge of the details of the case is sickening.

View on HN

That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.

Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.

The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.

I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judgement is the only thing that makes any sense in this case. The courts aren't there to play games with people like Jones.

edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21074211-alex-jones-...

> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications

Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.

Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.

Edit: To answer your question > How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?

If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none. If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.

Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.

I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.

Wanted a separate post for this comment --

I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.

>given several chances to comply with discovery requests

The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.

Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?

No, I do not know.

But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.

(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)

The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.

The rest of your post is speculation.

skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.

>the rest of the record of the case

Is that not available somewhere? You'd think it would be presented in detail, since this is the key reason for the default judgement.

I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.

I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)

For state courts... I don't know.

>but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.

Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.

I don't in the slightest bit disagree, just pointing out that they had discretion and it was still a choice.

Yeah, I think the part that makes this so controversial isn't that they exercised their discretion to screw him, which is absolutely expected, but that the court chose a total amount so large as to be newsworthy and garner sympathy for Jones and make people question the actions of the court by itself. The idea that some singular kook running a talk show could get a judgement that we rarely ever see levied upon major corporations that pour far more man hours into far more definable evil makes people who've never heard of the guy ask WTF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com