Originally Posted by Rhyder
"Among other things, Sawyer’s lawsuit alleged malicious prosecution, slander, defamation, abuse of process, negligence and fraud.
As a result of his experience, Sawyer has suffered emotional distress, shame, loss of reputation, sleeplessness, nightmares, fear of arrest and other consequences, the court papers added."
The awards made in many cases are not actually for the benefit of the defendant, but most of the time as a form of punishment for the company. If you have a multimillion dollar company doing something, and you slap them with a $2000 fine, its meaningless. Slapping them with a 2 million dollar settlement, gets their, and other companies like them, attention and is more likely to stop the criminal activity.
A couple examples:
In Florida, they passed a law stating they would fine anyone knocking the sand dunes down on the beach $50k. It’s bad for the environment and can cause further damage and erosion. Sounds like allot, but for the companies putting up a couple 100 million worth of condos, that was just entered as a small line item in the cost, and the dunes were gone. The fine did not deter the companies from doing something they knew was wrong and against the law. If they had made it a $50 million fine, perhaps the dunes would still be there.
in the famous coffee burn lawsuit, the settlement wasn’t as large as it was because of the fact that the woman burned herself, the settlement was that large because McDonalds had repeatedly disregarded the laws governing the temperature limits on their coffee, apparently you can get more coffee out of the same amount of grinds the hotter the water was, and accepted the estimated up to 700k in fines for not doing so as the profit margin was over a billion. So a settlement of less was not going to stop McDonalds from disregarding the law and putting people in danger to make a profit, but the large settlement did that. The Judge in fact put language to that effect in his deposition.
So it’s not always about if the person doing the lawsuit should receive the money, but more often a way to stop corrupt non caring organizations, civil and government, from disregarding laws and safety whenever they feel they will profit from it anyways.
Does four hours in lockup equal 2.2 million? Not likely, but I have a hard time believing this is an isolated case, how many people did they threaten with charging them with stolen vehicles in the past until they gave in? It’s hard for me to believe this was a spontaneous first time occurrence.
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