Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.

Timeline:

1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.

2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.

3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.

4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.

5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.

6. The parents sued.

7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.

8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.

9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.

10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.

The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.

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bena 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let's not ignore the fact that Jones's lawyers also completely messed up the discovery process by providing the prosecution with everything, including correspondence they had with Jones essentially admitting everything.

The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error.

It was a monumental fuck up.

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kypro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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watwut an hour ago | parent [-]

If you actually cared one about about victims, you would not be putting on "it is just about fuzzy feelings" bullshit on.

Also, this is the kind of case where USA allows Alex Jones kind of bad actors a lot more leeway then most of world countries.

	▲	kypro 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> If you actually cared one about about victims, you would not be putting on "it is just about fuzzy feelings" bullshit on. Ad hominem. Personally I think Alex Jones deserves far worse than this judgement. > Also, this is the kind of case where USA allows Alex Jones kind of bad actors a lot more leeway then most of world countries. Not an argument. I'm from the UK, I understand other countries police feelings more aggressively. That isn't justification. My opinion on this is strictly in regards to what I feel is appropriate punishment from the government given what Jones did. I don't like the idea that you can be fined by the government for lying (even if those lies hurt peoples feelings). I could accept it if the fine was reasonable, but $1b isn't reasonable in my opinion. We can disagree on these things without being mean to each other =) I appreciate your view. I guess I just disagree.