I make the comparison because the judge denied Alex a jury trial, based on him not turning over evidence, and not him missing court dates. Some of the evidence he failed to turn over is financial data. The argument made was that the lack of this evidence would prejudice the jury from finding Alex guilty. The judge sided with the prosecution on this so she defaulted him. Specifically the prosecution was making the argument that Alex would see his google analytics go up when he talked about Sandy Hook, and responded to it. While plausible, it hasn't really been proven that he ever even looked at his google Analytics. He blabbers on like a radio talk show host. As a percentage of all he said, Sandy Hood was a very small part of his coverage.
This gets even more murky because the financial evidence, such as his earning, is relevant to damages, and not really to guilt. And really, in the end the prosecution was able to estimate his earnings by expert testimony during the damages portion. So was it actually critical. Yet Alex was found guilty based on failing to provide it. And if it was critical, at most it established damages, not guilt.
Also, can you imagine how much the prosecution is prejudiced in a criminal trail where the defendant fails to hand over the murder weapon. Yet a jury trail is still allowed proceed.
* Default Judgment:
I'm not aware of Alex missing any days where he needed to be there pretrial. He sat through 10 days of depositions. Any specific articles you can link where he missed a pre-trial date he had to be there for?
* Not having evidence.
a) What does genuinely contested really mean?
b) That did not happen. The prosecution found an email with an attached screenshot containing a keyword. This was the gotcha moment in his previous trial. Just very dubious. Since attached screenshots are not easily searchable for keywords, and could have been easily missed without any malice by his lawyer.
* Jones was never allowed to take part in a "take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not". Every interview on the subject, Jones decries not being allowed do process. He wanted to be able to state facts of his case to a jury, his lawyers wanted to make constitutional arguments to the jury, and so on.
In a criminal case, this is equivalent to standing in your doorway and physically blocking the police from executing a lawful warrant. Except, in that case, the police have recourse -- they can push you aside and execute a search. That isn't possible in civil cases; the only power a court has to compel cooperation with discovery is threatening a default judgement. This is why responding to discovery is important, and it's why the punishment for failing to do so is "you lose". Otherwise, all plaintiffs in all civil cases would simply ignore discovery and the courts would be mostly useless.
Jones failed to EVEN RESPOND to multiple discovery requests by the plaintiffs. Quoting from the order [1]:
"One month after remand, plaintiff wrote to the Defendants inquiring about overdue responses. Plaintiffs offered defendant an additional 14 days... More than three weeks later, with no response provided, Plaintiffs brought the motion". The order goes on to explain that refusing to even respond to discovery requests is a pattern of behavior and not a one-off mistake.
Again, he didn't refuse to turn over discovered documents. He didn't even say "I don't have that". He just straight up ghosted opposing counsel's request. Didn't respond!!!
You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
You can respond and say "I don't have that". Of course, if you and your counsel knowingly and brazenly lie about not having a document, then civil damages are probably the least of your concerns because you will end up in prison and your lawyer will be disbarred. But, assuming "I don't have that" is true (or at least cannot be proved false beyond a reasonable doubt), then "I don't have that" is an acceptable response.
What you CANNOT do is simply ignore the request and expect a trial to proceed normally prior completion of discovery.
Ignoring discovery requests is a wildly insane thing for a lawyer to do. Failing to even respond to a discovery request after a reminder and extension from the opposing counsel -- and doing so multiple times over several trials -- is literally unfathomable to me.
There are only three reasons to do this. The first is that the discovered documents would be even more damaging than a default judgement in plaintiff's favor. The second is WILD incompetence. The third is mental instability. Those are the only three reasons, because... You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
This isn't an overdue homework assignment or some procedural snafu. Discovery is a core part of a trial, and messing around with it is a huge deal. Ignoring discovery is, in most cases, way worse than a guilty verdict. You lose, you piss off the judge, and any jury will most likely assume you have something to hide that is even worse than a guilty verdict.
I might ignore a discovery request if I felt that the documents in question would likely result in criminal prosecution or additional, much more serious, civil cases. That's the only rational reason that I can think of to ignore discovery. Because, seriously seriously seriously, You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
It's possible that this was just wild incompetence. It's possible that Jones is arrogant enough to think he is above the court. I do not know. But the behavior of him and his lawyers in these cases is beyond baffling. If they aren't hiding something criminal, and aren't hiding the most damning possible evidence, then they are either incompetent or insane.
Thank you for putting this more eloquently than I could. To say the judges have been lenient with Infowars is an understatement - if you or I were in a civil suit, we would have been defaulted far quicker than Jones was because the judges wouldn't have to worry about a media circus spiraling out from it. Jones did not just throw out a discovery request assuming it was junk mail one time, this was completely intentional and forced the court's hand.
In the Texas trial, I believe Andino Reynal (the counsel at trial) was the 13th attorney they had retained. Yes, 13. At this point, I'm convinced Alex Jones is right up there with Faketoshi as the worst client you could ever have.
> To say the judges have been lenient with Infowars is an understatement
The man was fined more than any other person in the history of humanity for saying words. A billion dollars! pharmaceutical companies that knowingly and willfully killed people have not been fined to such an extent.
And yet Alex was denied the ability to say words in his defence during his trial. "words" like "I'm innocent".
Citizens respect the outcomes of trials not because they follow a some set procedure, but because they think justice happened.
In major political case, in which a a populist talk show host, questioned the official narrative around an event. The state would not allow him to have his say, to raise constitutional issues. While the prosecution spent days talking about things he wasn't allowed to, and opened the trial by telling the jury this is their opportunity to take away Alex's megaphone, to silence him forever.
Alex might need to leave America, like Snowden, and continue his talk show abroad. Will the freest country in the world confiscate his passport to prevent that from happening.
This is a battle for public opinion. You might think you won this, but you haven't really.
>>Citizens respect the outcomes of trials not because they follow a some set procedure, but because they think justice happened.
I'm following this discussion as it's educational, but fwiw, dear God no. I trust trials, inasmuch as I do, because I believe they follow a known, afore-indicated and public procedure, which is the only remotely meaningfilul thing that can try to provide equality of treatment and a sane outcome.
> The state would not allow him to have his say, to raise constitutional issues
I could just quote thwayunion's comments on not being allowed to re-litigate issues that were already decided on in an attempt to derail the damages phase of the trial, but Jones already attempted to argue that what he was doing was protected speech. (In fact, I wasn't even going to respond until I remembered his TCPA motions where he tried just that.)
In De La Rosa v. Alex Jones et al, (D-1-GN-18-001842, 345th District Court of Travis County, Texas), Infowars filed an anti-SLAPP motion, which is implemented in Texas under the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). From [0]:
> "The [TCPA] protects citizens who petition or speak on matters of public concern from retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence them." In re Lipsky, 460 S.W.3d 579, 584 (Tex. 2015) (orig. proceeding). The protection comes in the form of a motion to dismiss a suit that would stifle the defendants' exercise of those rights.
In the anti-SLAPP motion, Jones' attorneys argued the case on its merits - that is, at this point in the trial, they weren't attempting to delay and obstruct by any means necessary, they were actually cooperating with the court.
And yet, despite actually working with the court, their motion was denied, meaning the lawsuit was not dismissed for infringing upon Jones' first amendment rights. And this is extremely notable since the TCPA is one of the most aggressive anti-SLAPP statues in the country - that is, if you lose an anti-SLAPP motion in Texas, your speech is so insanely out of line that basically no court would consider it to be defensible under the first amendment. Again, from [0]:
> CONCLUSION
> Having determined that the parents established a prima facie case for defamation per se that was not subject to the defense raised by Appellants, we affirm the district court's order denying Appellants' motion to dismiss.
His other anti-SLAPP motions also failed.
In summary, Jones already tried the first amendment defense, and lost. Therefore, even if he cooperated and wasn't defaulted on, he would still be barred from presenting a free speech defense during the damages hearing, because the court had already decided that his speech was not protected by the first amendment.
> You lose, you piss off the judge, and any jury will most likely assume you have something to hide that is even worse than a guilty verdict.
Also note that in a civil trial you do not have a right against self-incrimination. You can refuse to testify but your opponent can use your lack of testimony against you.
The contention from his lawyers was that no other libel case again a media company resulted in them having to turn over as much data as Alex had to. That he turned over multiple gigabytes of data.
So to say he "ignored discovery" is probably not what happened here.
Just the fact that he sat through 10 days of depositions, imagine getting interrogated for 10 days. Has to be close to torturous.
Turning over all your email/phone data, your financial records, email and phone data from all your employees, and still being asked for more and more. I doubt the NY times, or CNN would ever be forced to turn over all their employee emails in a libel case.
Eventually he wasn't going to able to turn over something. For example he may have not had google analytics to his youtube channel that youtube took down.
You yourself might assume that Alex was going to get a fair trial if he cooperated more with discover. But is that even a reasonable assumption. His own lawyers may have know that this was a political case he was going to lose no matter what, if the discovery process was already unusually intrusive.
This gets even more murky because the financial evidence, such as his earning, is relevant to damages, and not really to guilt. And really, in the end the prosecution was able to estimate his earnings by expert testimony during the damages portion. So was it actually critical. Yet Alex was found guilty based on failing to provide it. And if it was critical, at most it established damages, not guilt.
Also, can you imagine how much the prosecution is prejudiced in a criminal trail where the defendant fails to hand over the murder weapon. Yet a jury trail is still allowed proceed.
* Default Judgment:
I'm not aware of Alex missing any days where he needed to be there pretrial. He sat through 10 days of depositions. Any specific articles you can link where he missed a pre-trial date he had to be there for?
* Not having evidence. a) What does genuinely contested really mean? b) That did not happen. The prosecution found an email with an attached screenshot containing a keyword. This was the gotcha moment in his previous trial. Just very dubious. Since attached screenshots are not easily searchable for keywords, and could have been easily missed without any malice by his lawyer.
* Jones was never allowed to take part in a "take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not". Every interview on the subject, Jones decries not being allowed do process. He wanted to be able to state facts of his case to a jury, his lawyers wanted to make constitutional arguments to the jury, and so on.