It's a pretty large punishment.

He recklessly caused a lot of pain to families that already suffered a horrific tragedy, and profited from the attention by being (almost literally) a snake-oil salesman. He deserves a large punishment.

Yeah I'm not denying that, he clearly caused harm. But he's definitely being punished for it.

Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting?

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.

what kind of punishment do you think he deserves?

I’d agree re bankruptcy but can you discern between your use of damages (which you say is not a punishment) and fines (which you say are a punishment?

One is payed to the state, the other to another person, as in one regulates the relation to the state, the other the relation to another person.

What's your view on statutory damages for copyright infringement? "Wilful infringement" has statutory damages up to $150k per work. This is similar. Like this it's a punishment imposed by the state, through the medium of inflated damages.

No, I do not consider damages in copyright infringement a punishment. Whether damages are measured correctly or not in some case or other is beside the point I was making.

I’m confused what you define a punishment as then.

This is correct. People should split intent and outcome. So for example: you going to prison is a punishment. Your wife leaving you because of it, is not part of the punishment, that is an outcome, but it is not an outcome that is intended. The same here. There are damaged to be payed to the victims of alex' Jones heinous lies that have provably made the lives of people that were already victims so much worse. The judges entitled them to restitution for the damages done and because Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high. However. Going bankrupt was not the aim of the punishment. It just asks a high sum. He might have been able to pay it, which would have been fine. However. Jones didnt stop being an unethical human (pretty objectively, as long as you don't believe his lies) and tried to slither out of his duty to pay.

> Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.

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

>the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have

Which his lawyer then mistakenly sent to the Plaintiff's lawyer, so, they did have them.

Just FYI, the plaintiffs lawyers (not necessarily the court) was requesting financial documents that FSS LLC are required by law to have. They had two years to comply and did not.

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.

The Sandy Hook families have literally been awarded punitive damages.

Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.

Something can be punishing without being a punishment.

The intent is explicitly and specifically to punish someone and be a punishment.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not all consequences are punishments.

Default judgments are a punishment.

Your right to sell things derives from the first amendment.

No, but "commercial speech" does, though the protection is weaker than it is for political speech.

Commerce is constitutionally regulated in another way, by article I of the US constitution having a commerce clause allowing regulation, which, for example, is the basis of drug prohibition.