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Originally Posted by mbossman2
the law must be objective and consistent...but many of these lawsuits rely on juries to decide and they can (and do) make awards based upon their feelings rather than their facts and that leads to outrageous awards.
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There's simply no way for the law to be objective and consistent, though. If you somehow put objective or consistent payouts onto certain types of injuries, for example, then you run into the situation that I described before: where companies have a financial incentive to do the wrong thing.
The whole point of punitive damages is to prevent companies from acting in a cold, calculating way and simply choosing to harm people when it is in their financial interests to do so. Punitive damages do exactly what it sounds like: it is designed to punish the company for their mistakes. And depending on how egregious the mistake is, the punitive damages change appropriately. The only way to determined punishment is by a jury, who can take into consideration all the facts of a case and use their common sense and the sense of the community to decide the appropriate punishment.
Take two companies. One makes a flawed product due to inadequate design or testing, but once the flaw is found tries to reasonably correct it. The other also makes a flawed product, but upon discovering this fact, seeks to cover it up and assure the public that it is safe, all the while knowing that it is not. I think that for almost all people, the second company in this example acted in a far more malicious manner and is deserving of greater punishment. The problem is that
people have to decide this; there is no way to put this into objective and consistent law.