The jury found some harm done (1 dollars worth) and then issued punitive damages because of the intent to harm.
Punitive damages are for when a judge/jury feels the conduct of one of the party's was bad. Conduct includes things like trying to damage someone's reputation.
Again, I just fall to see what's scary here. Don't plan on lying about someone and your golden.
Punitive damages are typically capped at a 4:1 ratio to the actual damages. 10:1 is suspect, and even the extreme cases that go all the way to the Supreme Court are 500:1. This is 1m:1, 2000 times the most extreme cases (which the Supreme Court usually throws out).
Whether there's a cap on the monetary amount of damages is a separate question from whether there's a maximum ratio between the two. Supreme Court rulings on the ratio are binding everywhere in the US, so state-by-state differences in other aspects of the law aren't relevant to the question.
Yes, and that was not a defamation case. There's no chance on this earth that if this makes it to the Supreme Court the court will rule that a 1m:1 ratio is acceptable in a speech case (regardless of the political composition of the court at the time), and if they did it would represent a major step backward for free speech in the US.
After TXO, the Supreme Court wrote this in BMW, Inc. v. Gore where a similar 500:1 ratio was at stake (and was overturned) [0]:
> The $2 million in punitive damages awarded to Dr. Gore
by the Alabama Supreme Court is 500 times the amount of
his actual harm as determined by the jury. Moreover,
there is no suggestion that Dr. Gore or any other BMW pur-
chaser was threatened with any additional potential harm by
BMW’s nondisclosure policy. The disparity in this case is
thus dramatically greater than those considered in Haslip
and TXO.
> Once again, “we
return to what we said . . . in Haslip: ‘We need not, and indeed we cannot, draw a mathematical bright line between
the constitutionally acceptable and the constitutionally unacceptable that would fit every case. We can say, however,
that [a] general concer[n] of reasonableness . . . properly enter[s] into the constitutional calculus.’ ” Id., at 458 (quoting
Haslip, 499 U. S., at 18). In most cases, the ratio will be
within a constitutionally acceptable range, and remittitur
will not be justified on this basis. When the ratio is a
breathtaking 500 to 1, however, the award must surely “raise
a suspicious judicial eyebrow.”
When a "suspicious judicial eyebrow" gets raised in a speech case in the US, the plaintiff has already lost.
Then to circle back on the beginning of this thread, what exactly do you find so scary about this? The trial judge can adjust the damages down, so can the appellate courts, and if that doesn't resolve it ultimately the supreme court can eliminate the damages.
It's not terribly unusual for punitive damages to be adjusted after the jury awards them. So why be scared that a jury potentially gave out too much in damages?
I'm scared about what it says about our society that we've reached the point where juries think it's their job to punish speech and that punishment gets cheered on even in spaces like HN. Just because we have robust speech protections doesn't mean we always will, and I see this verdict and its reception here as evidence of declining interest in preserving speech protections in the United States.
It’s not ‘speech’. It’s anti-science climate denialism fed by a network of right-wing ratfuckers (political technical jargon) going back 60 years now. It’s a literal conspiracy to defraud the public.
Punitive damages are for when a judge/jury feels the conduct of one of the party's was bad. Conduct includes things like trying to damage someone's reputation.
Again, I just fall to see what's scary here. Don't plan on lying about someone and your golden.