This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
Those people won a tort (in theory), because he caused them damages that he was responsible for making remedying.
By the legal definition of slander, your statement is false.
You merely have to pay any damages you cause someone else. You truly have a child's grasp of these things.
The court case itself isn't a criminal trial. It's dispute resolution. Someone claims that another caused them damages, the court is empowered to provide remedy to those damages if the claims are found to be true. How does anyone make it to adulthood not knowing this?
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
Sure, some company poisons the groundwater with hexavalent chromium: let's fine them $2800 quintillion. That makes sense to me. I mean, it makes sense to you, right? I know that it must make sense to you, because I actually do see evidence of stupid shit thinking like this out in the real world all around me.
When you levy fines/awards that could never hoped to be paid in any real-world circumstances, you're not levying fines (or awards) at all, you're trying to fabricate a scenario, as a judge, to stop them from existing or doing what they do. And it isn't without consequence.
Here's an example... a judge sits at a bail hearing, finds out the arrestee is a cannibal murderer that eats babies, the cops found him with a half-eaten baby still screaming in his mouth but the doctors weren't able to save it. Does he deny bail, like a reasonable human being does? No, "Bail's set at $10 million!". You're happy because that monster will stay in jail until the trial. But now every other defendant will have their bail mysteriously drift higher, until you're crying that bail is unjust (it's not) because someone shoplifts and the bail is $50,000. And you just seem profoundly incapable of seeing this causal chain. Bail, for instance, was only ever meant to secure someone's appearance at trial. By definition it needs to be a high enough amount that they'd rather lose out on the money than skip the trial, but low enough that they can scrape together the money at all. Done correctly, there are amounts that carefully (but narrowly) find that overlap. But because apparently no one gets that or can get that, everything's fucked up beyond all sanity.
Awards are like this too. By setting the award too high, these people will never even get a fraction of it (the damages they suffered will never get recompense), and rather than incentivizing Jones' future good behavior, they pushed him into even more noxious and socially maladjusted behavior and have inspired some sort of narcissist-martyr complex beyond even that which he was already making the world suffer for.
That's why I didn't bring it up. Because it's a dumb idea that totally misunderstands everything.
The actual damages awarded here is about $64 million per plaintiff, which is a lot, but not utterly absurd. If we used that amount for your chromium hypothetical, the company would need to have killed about 44 trillion people. This is, I'm reliably informed, more people than there actually are. A reasonable amount for damages in the groundwater case would be whatever it costs to either clean it up or take ownership of the affected land. If it's discovered after it has already hurt people then it needs to include damages for those people.
It doesn't really compare with bail. As you say, the purpose of bail is to ensure appearance at trial. The purpose of tort awards is to compensate for damages, and sometimes to punish. Bail is set based on the defendant: how likely are they to flee, what sort of means do they have? Damages are set based on the consequences of the tort: how much damage was there, does the person deserve additional punishment on top?
If a person has $100, then setting bail above $100 doesn't make any sense. It's equivalent to no bail. Awarding more than $100 in damages makes sense, because they can obtain more money later. Even if they don't, you're meant to award based on damages, not ability to pay. If the damages were $1,000 then the award should be $1,000 regardless of whether the person is a hobo or Jeff Bezos.
But it wasn't a low award. Are you unaware, or are you thinking that awards above $1.4 billion is low?
>The actual damages awarded here is about $64 million per plaintiff, which is a lot, but not utterly absurd.
If we divided it among 1.4 billion people, it'd only be a buck each. How can it be high if it's just one dollarino per person?
That was referring to dumping chromium. You said you've seen such judgments be tiny fractions of what was awarded against Jones. When I said maybe that means those judgments should be higher, you came up with this ridiculous $2800 quadrillion number. I'm saying, perhaps there is some reasonable number that is less than $2800 quadrillion but more than the low numbers you've seen.
> If we divided it among 1.4 billion people, it'd only be a buck each. How can it be high if it's just one dollarino per person?
If Jones had damaged and been sued by 1.4 billion people, and lost, then $1.4 billion would indeed be an extremely low award. But he wasn't.
Again, it's about actual damages, not assessing the moral severity of the injustice against the defendant's ability to pay. The jury determined that Jones damaged these specific plantiffs to a degree equivalent to a bit under a billion dollars. You can certainly disagree with that, but "if we divided it among 1.4 billion people" doesn't make a lick of sense. If 1.4 billion people were damaged to a degree that worked out to $1/person, then it would be the correct award. Nothing to do with Jones' ability to pay or how many people it's divided among.
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
But when a corporation does something like Bhopal, you can generally count on them hyperprofessionally attending to every detail of the ensuring tort case. Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Legal Eagle and the commentary on the cell phone evidence (3 years ago) https://youtu.be/x-QcbOphxYs
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
free speech doesn't absolve you of responsibility for the damages your words cause, despite not causing them directly
And if he had been fined $35 million dollars, the example would have been set, they'd have been paid, and he'd have spent the next 20 years figuring out how much that award fucked him when he couldn't be insured for anything, when no one would touch him for any sort of gig worth having. He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
He was busy hiding millions of dollars in assets well before the judgements were handed down [0]. He fraudulently declared bankruptcy in multiple shell companies to try and delay the proceedings [1]. He made no secret of the fact that he was going to do everything in his power to avoid giving a single dime to the Sandy Hook families, regardless of the outcome. He had known for years that he was lying, his own staff had repeatedly raised objections to his behavior in writing, and if the award was $35 million, that's only a few year's profits for him to sacrifice. For reference, his personal expenses are $100k/mo [2] and his previous salary was $1.4 million/yr [3]. On Infowars' best days, they would rake in $800k in profit [4]. Sure, those $800k days weren't super often, but they are still a cartoonishly profitable business by every measure. $35m would not be a real punishment.
It should also be noted that $1.4b is the combined amount for all of the plaintiffs, not just one person. And this isn't an isolated incident; he's been defaming people his entire career, and every time he got a small judgement or was only required to apologize, he just went on to defame other people [5], and all the times he didn't get sued he never even apologized. He only cares about money, so that's how you send a message to him.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention that the Sandy Hook families did offer to settle: $85 million paid over 10 years [6]. Jones countered with $55 million [7]. If Jones and his companies could afford $5.5m/yr, that says a lot about the profitability of the operation and the inadequacy of $35m.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/business-alex-jones-austin-texas-...
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61142905
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64644080
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/alex-jone...
[4]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alex-jones-testifies-in-sandy...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Litigation
[6]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/28/alex-jones-...
[7]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alex-jones-offers-to-pay-sand...
In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.
Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, verifiably lied under oath, committed bankruptcy fraud to delay the proceedings, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.
If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.
In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, defaming the victims during the trial and chasing away every competent attorney he had, leaving him with Norm Pattis (CT trial) and Andino Reynal (TX trial), attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.
The real kicker is that defamation law is full of snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't even keep one of those around speaks volumes.
Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He and Free Speech Systems then declared bankruptcy because he knew paying for the consequences of his actions was impossible, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, everything is for sale, including the "news" outlet he ran.
Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). He got Judge Lopez to rule his Twitter account was not an asset that can be auctioned off, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by The Alex Jones Store, a company owned by one of his friends (Bigly), which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets unable to spread his message.
> Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people.
I fully support greater penalties on corporations that break the law. That said, I still view Jones' judgements as well-earned and reasonable.