By his own admission, Jones spent years spreading malicious lies about these people. Some people have had to go in to hiding because his unhinged followers started tracking these people down.

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.

Defamation is free speech now?

It's not, as defamation should have legal consequences. A one billion dollar payout verdict is just orders of magnitude off in terms of proportionality.

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.

I'm not sure that is the argument that you think it is. If a jury awarded it after seeing all the evidence and the majority of people agree with it, wouldn't that indicate that it is fair? What criteria do you have that overrides the vast majority of people's sense of fairness?

A jury isn't involved in a default judgement afaik

They come up with damages.

No defamation was ever proven in court. It was a default judgement.

Allowing a default judgement in a civil case is equivalent to pleading guilty in a criminal case

As has been noted in other threads on this page: free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequence. It specifically does NOT mean you cannot get sued for saying something that demonstrably causes immense harm to someone.

But a billion dollars. The order of magnitude isn't 'immense stress to an individual', it's on the order of burning down tens or hundreds of houses.

[delayed]

>the judge simply doesn't like the guy

That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the US justice system.

I don't have a lot of confidence in the US justice system :)

Right the problem here is the targeted, selective enforcement -- really, overenforcement -- of laws. Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music. They didn't. But the point of the eye watering judgments was to send a message. Same here.

>Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music

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.

The goal of punitive damages is to prevent the person from engaging in the illegal activity again.

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.

I think you'd feel differently if some person with a huge following spread lies about you and your family and those lies resulted in thousands of people threatening and harassing your family.