Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settle...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rudy-giuliani-def...
Depp v Herd defamation was around $10m.
Sweden isn't the only Nordic country.
Just look up speeding tickets in Finland and Norway.
RDDT market cap today is 29.1B.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
The amount of comments opining here without knowing a smidge of the details of the case is sickening.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 rest of your post is speculation.
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 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.
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.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
But 500k per person maybe, if it really heinous?
It's just excessive.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
A legal system must be robust even to weird or peculiar people who refuse to work with its rules and still produce reasonable results.
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
There are always going to be crazy people and a system must be able to deal with them.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
The chilling effect intended here is like the $100 million judgments against people in suits brought by the RIAA circa 2000 for torrenting music.
As soon as you say "I think more gun control might be a good thing to prevent children from being murdered" you get threatened, bullied, and harassed by a lunatic unhinged fringe stoked up by dirty malicious lies. Is this free speech? Of course not.
He has worked for years to shut people up by creating a hostile anger-filled environment where any normal person is afraid to go against him. Alex Jones hates free speech.
Unfortunately, Alex Jones the person and the nature of Sandy Hook means that most people won't be able to look at this situation with any sort of sanity. The verdict could have been 100 trillion and people would have said it was deserved.
That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the US justice system.
I don't understand the above, but they've actually made this judgement, and it's much too large. A firm worth as little as 30 million can be an incredible innovative company, supported by a government and serious effort, and here we have people just handing out a 1 billion dollar fine over something where nothing even close to that value has been destroyed.
It's as I said in my initial comment, the value of a whole town.
If Jones stops spreading lies about this people, then perhaps you have an argument, and a smaller punitive judgement would be enough. But if he keeps going, then we can only conclude that the judgement wasn't enough.
Definitely how that works.
If I burn down somebody's house and sell tickets to watch, the damages are easy to calculate! It's just my ticket revenue! THE MARKET DECIDED!
Gotta give you some credit though, you beat out some real competition for dumbest take in the thread.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages is very much a normal thing.
> He has been charged the equivalent of the GDP of Samoa
He probably did more human damage than all of Samoa's citizens combined.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.