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D.C. jury unjustly finds Mark Steyn liable for defamation of Michael Mann, awards $1 million in punitive damages.
American Thinker ^ | 9 Feb, 2024 | Thomas Lifson

Posted on 02/09/2024 5:49:49 PM PST by MtnClimber

Global warming doomsayer Michael Mann of Penn State University has won his defamation lawsuit against critics Mark Steyn and Rand Simburg, proving that conservatives cannot get fair verdicts from District of Columbia juries. This is a huge, structural problem for the federal judiciary, because D.C. courts have jurisdiction over many actions regarding the federal government. Bias to the point of hatred of Republicans and conservatives by D.C. juries has made those courts a part of the Democrats’ armory.

If Republicans ever again get the Oval Office and majorities in both Houses of Congress, they must redefine the jurisdiction of lower courts so that actions involving the federal government rotate among all judicial districts. Democrats will fight this measure with a Senate filibuster, but Republicans can argue that the juries must “look like America.”

I am deeply worried for Mark’s health, as he has been very ill, and this massive setback might lead to worse health outcomes.

I rely on retired super-lawyer John Hinderaker, who attended some of the trial, on the question of the unjustness of the verdict:

The verdict was disappointing to those of us who followed the case and thought that Michael Mann presented a pathetically inadequate case. The jury actually agreed: it found that the defendants had defamed Mann, but awarded only a token $1 in damages, since Mann had failed to prove any. But it found that both Simberg and Steyn acted with actual malice–they didn’t actually believe what they said about Mann–and awarded punitive damages in the amount of $1,000 against Simberg, and $1 million against Steyn.

In a sane world, this case never would have gone to the jury. The legal standard is actual malice, which means the defendants must have thought, subjectively, that what they said wasn’t likely true.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: leftism
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To: null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; bgill; bitt; ...

P


21 posted on 02/09/2024 7:19:34 PM PST by bitt (<img src=' 'width=30%>)
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To: dfwgator

Yeah but if we do we’d probably have to invite Francis Scott Key back as well to re-write the national anthem, which then would authentically be the ‘black national anthem’.

But with a little luck the Brits might be able to take out a critical mass of congress-critters as well.


22 posted on 02/09/2024 7:34:30 PM PST by Stosh
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To: MtnClimber

When the story starts with “D.C. Jury...” you can extrapolate the gist.


23 posted on 02/09/2024 7:36:19 PM PST by _longranger81
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To: Revel

“Hockey Stick”

“He wrote software to rig the temperature Climate numbers.”

I have seen no evidence to even begin to justify the word “rig”. Kindly provide a link if you have one readily available.

Nor have I seen evidence to justify what I’ve heard of Mann’s elaborations from the “Hockey Stick”.


24 posted on 02/09/2024 7:46:43 PM PST by Brian Griffin
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To: MtnClimber

“In Tull v. United States....the Court viewed assessment of the amount of penalty as involving neither the “substance” nor a “fundamental element” of a common-law right to trial by jury, it held permissible the Act’s assignment of that task to the trial judge.”

https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-07/05-cases-at-common-law.html

I believe in my youth, punitive damages were only awarded in the South. I may be wrong about that.


25 posted on 02/09/2024 7:56:03 PM PST by Brian Griffin
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To: Stosh

Thank you.


26 posted on 02/09/2024 8:08:16 PM PST by HIDEK6 (God bless Donald Trump. )
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To: MtnClimber

Structural racism - I don’t know how you remedy this … it’s a Trump card for the RATS …


27 posted on 02/09/2024 8:14:59 PM PST by 11th_VA (Celebrate Climate Change !!!)
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To: JennysCool

“Mann is a complete fraud.”

The “hockey stick” graph itself seems to be sound from what I’ve read, but several explanations for it may be possible.

People often attack the Covid vaccines here. Their facts are true, but their conclusions are quite often off. The double-blind clinical trial is the best method to determine efficacy. The trial sizes were too small to firmly quantify safety and side effects.


28 posted on 02/09/2024 8:20:49 PM PST by Brian Griffin
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To: MtnClimber

I would think trying to collect on a DC judgement in Canada would be difficult.

Why didn’t you use a Canadian court?


29 posted on 02/09/2024 8:28:10 PM PST by Brian Griffin
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To: MtnClimber

i hope they gave him twelve years to pay.


30 posted on 02/09/2024 9:04:15 PM PST by justrepublican (Screaming like a "Vexatious requester" at a Wellstone memorial........)
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To: Brian Griffin

Depends a lot , I guess, on what one means by the word “rig”.

One of the most compelling witnesses at the Steyn trial was a statistician named Wyner (from Penn, Mann’s current employer). The gist of his testimony is that time-series temperature reconstructions from proxy data are almost unimaginably complicated, and what choices one makes in cranking the data can give a wide variety of results - he actually presented a bunch of graphs he generated with (I’m assuming) Mann’s data, a few of which were hockey sticks, most of which were not.

Some of the technicalities can be found here: https://climate.fas.harvard.edu/files/climate/files/mcshane_2010.pdf

That’s a pretty heavy duty paper - long as all get-out, and technical as hell. But you can kind of get the flavor of it from the abstract at the top, and a couple of sample graphs, like Figures 14 and 17.

Bottom line, according to what I understood of Wyner: the clean, almost unchanging “handle” of the hockey stick Mann presented was at a minimum grossly over-simplified in ignoring the wide range of uncertainty inherent in the data, and at worst was deliberately deceptive (presumably, I would guess, to make a particular ideological point).

By the way, if you’re the same dude that comments on Francis Merton’s site, I enjoy your stuff (and sometimes agree with it!).


31 posted on 02/09/2024 9:41:39 PM PST by Stosh
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To: MtnClimber

Is this not defamation on Prof. Michael E. Mann’s part?

Joe Manchin is “a modern-day villain, who drives a Maserati, lives on a yacht, courtesy of the coal industry, and is willing to see the world burn as long as it benefits his near-term investments portfolio.”

Joe, get your lawyer on the phone!


32 posted on 02/09/2024 10:12:48 PM PST by jonrick46 (Leftniks chase illusions of motherships at the end of the pier.)
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To: Brian Griffin

You comment on the COVID vaccine—”the trial sizes were too small to firmly quantify safety and side effects”—is in error. In the phase III clinical trials Pfizer used 43,000 participants:

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-conclude-phase-3-study-covid-19-vaccine

Now back to this smuck, Michael Mann . . .


33 posted on 02/09/2024 10:31:50 PM PST by jonrick46 (Leftniks chase illusions of motherships at the end of the pier.)
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To: Brian Griffin

Or someone else wrote it for him. This was years ago and most of information has been censored out of the world. But this is pretty informative.

https://cei.org/blog/the-heart-of-climategate-the-fudge-factor/


34 posted on 02/10/2024 1:46:00 AM PST by Revel
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To: MtnClimber

Wonder how many judges juries are making money of nailing conservatives to the cross this amount of cases don’t happen by accident.


35 posted on 02/10/2024 8:10:20 AM PST by Vaduz
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To: Pres Raygun

Mark has lived in New Hampshire for a long time now.

But to the point of the verdict and damages, I honestly can’t believe it. It is shocking.


36 posted on 02/10/2024 9:28:54 AM PST by gloryblaze
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To: LVS1

>If successful it would lower Simburg’s penalty to $4 and Steyn’s to $4,000<

It looks like the total actual damages were $1. Split between the defendants, that would be 50 cents each, making both punitive damage awards $2.

Mann sued Tim Ball for the same thing in Canada. Ball chose to argue the science aspect, Mann refused to turn over his fraudulent data and Ball won.

Steyn was not allowed to argue the climate change aspect by an earlier ruling by this judge. Steyn was metaphorically handcuffed because there is no way Mann will ever turn over the data.

Mann did not have to pay one cent to bring this suit. He has dark money, deep pockets backers who paid the freight. He was either hoping for a settlement or just trying to drag it out for so long that Steyn was bankrupted. Steyn is bankrupted without the verdict so the punishment worked either way. That should be the crime.

EC


37 posted on 02/10/2024 9:35:12 AM PST by Ex-Con777
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To: Army Air Corps

I sure hope so. This is outrageous! Really like Mark Steyn... I wish he was still on the radio and/or TV like he used to be.


38 posted on 02/10/2024 9:43:03 AM PST by nutmeg (FJB)
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To: Pres Raygun

Bypass would be to get blood supply there and preserve sufficient ejection fraction. Three heart attacks in past year and the wheel chair suggest he may be beyond that and need a transplant. Don’t know whether he’s up to or eligible for that much less whether the system would ever grant him an available match. Suppose going cyborg, as Dick Cheney did for awhile, might be a temporizing option. But likely lack of coverage from Canada healthcare and a $1M judgement would make financing either problematic.


39 posted on 02/10/2024 11:57:30 AM PST by JohnBovenmyer (Biden/Harris events are called dodo ops)
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To: JennysCool

And he suffered no harm.

No harm, no damages unless you are a prominent innocent conservative.


40 posted on 02/10/2024 12:46:11 PM PST by Jacquerie (ArticleVBlog.com)
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