Posting this on /liberty/, because this has doubled my desire for a private court system.
> A Georgia jury has awarded an eye-popping $1 billion verdict against a security company after an apartment complex guard was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.
>Zachary, who was 22 at the time of the rape, should never have been hired because he wasn't licensed to be an armed guard, Stewart said.
>The judge had already determined the security company was liable, so the jury was only determining damages, Stewart said. After reading the verdict, Stewart said, jurors immediately left the jury box — without waiting for the judge's permission — to hug Cheston and her mother.
>Verdicts in the tens of millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions, are not uncommon, Jeff Dion, director of the National Crime Victim Bar Association said in an email. But he's never heard of a $1 billion verdict in a case with a single victim.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180523203035/http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/05/23/georgia-jury-awards-1-billion-after-guard-rapes-teen.html
1 billion dollars. Think about that for a second, 1 BILLION dollars. That's the price of heart bypass surgery for 8500 people. A group of ~10 US adults deemed competent enough to perform as jurors sat down, listened to the case, and said "Yeah, a billion sounds right." Even if this is successfully appealed, and the amount is dropped to "just" 10% of its current value, that's still an absurdly high amount of money.
I'm not trying to make light of rape, but the moral hazards here far outweigh the potential benefits. In the US, if you had one million dollars, you would never have to work again in your life. So very clearly, the magnitude of the award has nothing to do with the woman's well-being; it's about making a "statement". And this statement will be heard by every single con-artist in the US. The judicial system has effectively elevated women to an existential liability for any non-Fortune-500 company, while simultaneously requiring them to artificially inflate the female/male ratio.
You can't even argue, "Well, spending money isn't necessarily a zero-sum game" in these cases; this isn't a profit-seeking investment.