81–90 of 219 posts
From the nytimes article, the judgment will be paid by Oberlin's insurance company, it will not come out of the endowment, they have not apologized, they are not accepting they were wrong, there have been no resignations. Meredith Raimondo, the Dean of Students at the time, who was passing out flyers and far more, nine months ago to accept a position as Vice President of Student Affairs at Oglethorpe University https…
Is there more to this story? I'm honestly pretty shocked by this. The college basically got into hot water for having its Dean show up at a protest holding a flyer.
Oh wow, no-- go read the the court docs. Particularly what they obtained in discovery. Or just check out the appeals decision, which gives an okay summary (though it skips some of the schools wrongdoing that wasn't disputed): https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2022/2022-O...
They got in hot water because a dean was distributing flyers full of falsehoods, because the school posted in their buildings and refused to remove a resolution repeating the same falsehoods, because -- even knowing the claims were false they refused to issue any kind of retraction or reversing statement (because they thought doing so would anger the students), instead trying to extract a promise to not report shoplifters to the police anymore, and then the school barred one of their vendors from doing business with the bakery, causing a significant financial damage to it.
One could excuse the school for making some initial errors in judgement, but they aggressively refused to correct them even after the errors were abundantly clear.
Their actual award was much larger but the punitive damages were limited by damage caps to twice the compensatory damages -- too bad, because given Oberlin's wealth the ultimate cost is comparatively insignificant compared to the magnitude of their gross and sustained misconduct.
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That is what punitive damages are - they are not required to be connected to the size of the damage, they are meant to punish the defendant for royally (in the judge's view) fucking up, and send a message to other similar defendants to not do such things And $5M in compensatory damages seems about right for 2 years of a successful small bakery
Honestly I'm not very keen on pinning blame/monetary responsibility on single individuals/companies to 'prevent/deter' unknown future crimes. We shouldn't be signaling with big punishments bigger than the crimes call for. We should carefully consider the crime based on the individual and how much punishment is appropriate for that individual to compensate the victim/deter that single individual/company from continuin…
If they were meant to deter others, they would be pegged to the size of other potential wrongdoers. But they are not. They are pegged to the size of the actual wrongdoer.
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Why would we not want to stop others? Why not consider a positive side effect of deterring others? Sorry, what are you saying here does not make any sense to me at all. It seems like that you are suggesting that we could simply not punish people at all for first offense, as long as they can credibly promise that they won’t reoffend. After all, if they won’t reoffend, under what you say, there is no point in punishing…
Why should my punishment be more severe because you want to stop others from doing something in the future? That's a disproportionate amount of punishment for the individual. Punishment should be equal to the crime, not have an additional component to be used to deter others who I have no affiliation with. Public prosecution is absolutely terrible way to deal with dealing out punishment. Not all individuals are the s…
Out of its three comma endowment, it will pay a settlement of about six hundred student's annual tuition, which is a little less than a quarter of their undergrad population. After a six year smear campaign, sounds like money well spent!
Apparently, Oberlin's President sent out the following email which states their insurance will pay > Dear Obies, > Today, Oberlin College and Conservatory initiated payment in full of the $36.59 million judgment in the Gibson’s Bakery case, an amount that represents the awarded damages and interest owed. Please see the college’s public statement below. > While this outcome is a disappointment, our financial plans for…
I am not all sympathetic to Oberlin, but this judgement is absurd. It is many many lifetimes of income for a small bakery. Even if they were forced into bankruptcy, this is beyond the pale. "The latest amount consists of about $5 million in compensatory damages, nearly $20 million in punitive damages, $6.5 million in attorney’s fees and almost $5 million in interest." This only contributes to our litigious society wh…
The fact that Oberlin's misconduct has has zero serious consequences for the institution or the culpable staff shows that the punitive damages were far too small. There is little incentive to change their practices to avoid similar incidents in the future.
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https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-qualified-immunity-and-what... You really think any random person can detain someone? Do you also think you can force someone to stop for speeding? You can arrest someone for smoking weed as an ordinary citizen? Do you think you can sleep with a prostitute and then arrest them? https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/20/c...
A police officer has better legal protections, and in practice can get away with a lot more. But in theory, what they are supposed to be able to do is surprisingly similar. On detaining a random person, quoting https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/citizen%27s_arrest , In general, the ability to perform a citizen’s arrest is the same for a regular person as it is for a police officer without a warrant.
This is completely hypothetical, I don’t own a gun.
But, because of the incident I posted. Even the very red GA and the Republican governor thought that it might not be a good idea to let any random yokel detain someone
https://apnews.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-georgia-arrests-gov...
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Honestly I'm not very keen on pinning blame/monetary responsibility on single individuals/companies to 'prevent/deter' unknown future crimes. We shouldn't be signaling with big punishments bigger than the crimes call for. We should carefully consider the crime based on the individual and how much punishment is appropriate for that individual to compensate the victim/deter that single individual/company from continuin…
The magnitude of punitive damages is not to deter others. It's to deter the responsible party. They are calibrated to be large enough to catch the attention of the party being held responsible. If they were meant to deter others, they would be pegged to the size of other potential wrongdoers. But they are not. They are pegged to the size of the actual wrongdoer.
So insurance is gonna pony up for them, they won’t have to touch their BILLION dollars, the my don’t have to apologize, and aren’t admitting any wrongdoing.
At least the Gibson family will get something out of it. Not sure it’s justice, but $36Mil would go far…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Like me, the majority of the campus was not here at the beginning of this matter in 2016. The buck stops with my predecessor. Delightful executive engineering of the slimiest sort. One gets paid to own the past at that level. Accepting the job requires due diligence on the past and being paid to own any uncertainty. That is one disgustingly cowardly sentence meriting immediate action by the board to throw this bum…
Can I ask why you’re so upset about something that apparently does not involve you at all?
We’re in the same society, this is bad precedent, and I’d prefer for it not to happen where I am.