Today, D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving ruled on post-trial motions that were made following the trial of Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg. The case has been pending in various courts and before various judges for approximately thirteen years, and the motions ruled on today were made almost exactly one year ago.
The jury awarded $1 in compensatory damages against both Steyn and Simberg, and punitive damages in the amount of $1,000 against Simberg and $1,000,000 against Steyn. Most observers expected the punitive damages award against Mark Steyn to be reversed or reduced.
In today’s order, Judge Irving reduced the punitive damage award against Steyn to $5,000, the amount that his counsel suggested should be the maximum, if the award were not reversed entirely. So this means that after thirteen years of litigation, Michael Mann will recover $6,002 (assuming no further changes on appeal). At the same time, an award of $530,820.21 has been entered against Mann, on behalf of former defendant National Review. So one might say that the lawsuit has been a disaster for him.
But I am not sure he sees it that way. He inflicted tremendous harm on the defendants, in the form of millions of dollars in legal fees and other litigation costs. Mann himself spent nothing, as his bills were apparently paid by a left-wing sugar daddy. Mark Steyn likes to say that the process is the punishment, and that was certainly true here: he was dragged through thirteen years of litigation, forced to incur millions in costs, and for years threatened with the prospect of a ruinous jury verdict. And in fact, the jury’s finding that Mark libeled Professor Mann–the result of bias on the jury’s part, in my opinion–was permitted to stand.
So who really came out on top, is hard to say.
A legal note: in recent years, courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have clamped down on excessive awards of punitive damages. In general, along with other factors, they require some degree of proportionality between any actual damages found by the jury, and the punitive damages awarded. Here, the correct amount of punitive damages would have been zero. But the courts’ current, skeptical attitude toward such verdicts prevented a greater injustice from being done.
